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Comment by areoform | Hacker News Reader

Believe it or not, YouTube is not good pedagogy. A YouTube video doesn't help you to fill in the gaps of your understanding by re-working a difficult concept with you. A YouTube video, nor an app, doesn't go through the steps of solving a problem with you, and watch how you do it to give you constructive criticism.

Educational content is amazing, but it's not teaching. It's a resource. It's like saying that the existence of books negates the need for teaching and that all the clever people are now writing books.

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"A YouTube video, nor an app, doesn't go through the steps of solving a problem with you, and watch how you do it to give you constructive criticism."—neither will 99.9% of teachers. Most of them out of sheer incompetence, impatience, and general inadequacy to be around children, some due to the fact that there are 30+ children in the classroom and they literally don't have the time and energy for that kind of effort. I am not speaking about American schools with 25K+/year tuition fee in NYC, I am speaking about teachers in a general classroom in Punta Arenas, Chile or a general classroom in Kruševac, Serbia.

> A YouTube video doesn't help you to fill in the gaps of your understanding by re-working a difficult concept with you. A YouTube video, nor an app, doesn't go through the steps of solving a problem with you, and watch how you do it to give you constructive criticism.

Video is a replacement for teacher-centered lectures, that don't do these things either. Of course the tutoring part of education is also important.

It’s a great improvement over older videos in the classroom though, since there’s feedback from the actual viewers.

(I vaguely remember being shown some educational video in class that was over half old wireframey CGI transitions with what an old person thought technobabble looked like all over it. It was supposed to be about the environment.)

I agree with the core idea of this, but have you personally watched 3B1B? It feels to me like a largely isolated case, and I hope “remote learning” does not become the norm, but … it is really amazing.

It's also very limited in scope compared to actual math courses.

It's a supplemental resource, not core instruction.

Don't try to make it into something it was never intended to be.

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