I'm with you 100% on technical instructional videos in general. It is absolutely the worst medium for the simple fact that you usually need to go back over the steps multiple times the first time you do something.

Another place where it came up, but probably on purpose was our annual security refresher course. In the old days this was basically a slide deck with a multiple choice quiz at the end. You could breeze through it in 10 minutes because the content was always the same and the questions were obvious.

That was replaced by an unskippable video system where you have to sit through a full hour of people not emailing their passwords to phishers and remembering to lock their screen when they walk away from their desk. It's miserable.

yes! my company gives all developers a pluralsight license but i find it basically useless. I spend half my time pausing and replaying video to follow along. so much more efficient to have it laied out in text.

A combo of 10 mins of fame and ad revenue i guess.

And i strongly agree. I hate to go searching for solutions to some computer problem only to find page after page of videos demonstrating step by step how to do something.

Reminds me of when i compared Cisco and Microsoft official training material on their products. The former was 99% text, as the interface to the routers were text based. The latter was a much larger tome, yet held mostly full page image of multiple choice dialogs and wizards with a small amount of descriptive text underneath.

Safe to say i learned more from the former than the latter...

Are these videos on youtube? Youtube has an auto transcribe to text feature from what I've read.. any way to make a script that takes thsi vids and reuploads them to youtube to get the transcription and then repost those to a new blog and include a link back to the original video?

When I scan docs I need to ctrl+f to find the terms I'm looking for to be quicker in knowing if these are the docs I'm looking for.

As I plan to teach some code using minecraft and modding this summer, the idea of having to watch a bunch video during the process frightens me. There must be a quick search function made somehow.

Deep Learning is going to help here soon; making a transcript is now becoming easy and voice search should be doable by talented 12-year olds quickly.