I explicitly avoid video tutorials and explanations unless there is literally (lol) no other option. It's almost never the appropriate medium -- not searchable, not indexed, and rewinding to repeat earlier information is a terrible experience.

I have exactly the opposite preference. I find I learn much faster from video tutorials and actively seek them out.

None of that is related to the parent's comment - even if you prefer them, they're still not searchable or indexed, and rewinding is still a bad experience.

Given that many people (including GP and me) prefer document content (not "text" because you can put interactive tools and diagrams in documents, but not text) and it has all of those advantages, it seems like it's pretty clearly the superior medium.

Plus, human brains are notoriously bad at introspection, so I wouldn't be surprised if you don't actually learn faster from videos, and just prefer them because they're e.g. more engaging.

I don't understand what is meant with not indexable. Many YouTube videos have time stamps embedded in the time line and you can also link a video with a certain timestamp it's only a right click away on desktop.

"Indexable" here means that the content is made accessible in a form such that it can be indexed for searching. You can't search through a YouTube video, and this makes them significantly worse than textual documents that can be.

The parent's comment referenced preference, so it does relate to that comment.

I wrote the above post and I agree 100%

My work has been trying to promote e-learning with ted talk-like videos and I absolutely hate it. It's not just about the speed.

I can learn so much quicker with text. I can skim through the parts I already know and spend more time on the parts I need to carefully consider. With video I need to skip around and it's hard to keep track of what's being discussed then.

I think it's really the younger people in the organisation that ask for it because they're used to youtubes. I rarely watch youtube, probably once a month or so. Makes sense but they try to push it on everyone by setting a goal of so many videos to do.

However even when I was young I thought that classroom teaching was inefficient and I could learn much better myself. One of the problems (also with video) is that you have to slow to the speed of the slowest participant.

For computer stuff usually text is better than video, except maybe how to do complex stuff in some desktop application or walk through games. But for learning how to raise a fence a video is so much better than text.