Let's not pretend this has all been figured out and perfected. Heck, most maths professors I encountered in my studies could trace their scientific lineage straight back to C.F.Gauss[1] and that's how they taught. Don't get me wrong, some were great teachers, others not so much, but there are valid alternatives to the classic lecture.
There's also Unacademy a company I'm sure has helped millions of people learn new things.
The lecture format is very old and would not have persisted if it didn't provide a good value. At the same time, it's age also implies that there is room for improvement.
(The 3B1B one is of course also among the best :
https://eater.net/quaternions )
And, while it was before my time, universities might have had some before the World Wide Web ?
Video has been around for much longer than that too.
I'm also not sure why "high production values" is supposed to matter, aren't Feynman's video lectures good enough for you ?
To hell with the majority which will forget it next week and go management or delivery. They are unimportant for the key idea of education.
Is it that nobody kwen how to make good videos before? Or do you mean that teaching cannot be improved?
https://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~key/PHY1600/PER%20Papers/Ef...
Why do teachers do things the way they do? Is it because they are mostly stupid, incompetent people who haven’t thought as much about their job as amateurs have? Everyone has “the solution” but, yet, that great insightful idea doesn’t take off. Is it a conspiracy on our part? Perhaps it’s because that solution doesn’t work at scale.
I can only think of: because nothing works at scale in education and it’s generally slow as hell.
What was the result of this? Most didn’t watch the video and those that did didn’t finish it. Students largely don’t watch lecture videos or videos of any kind regarding math. For online courses students are using AI programs to do their work. They answer questions that should take minutes in seconds.
Most of the people I’ve responded to on the thread I started have no idea what they are talking about.
In particular, I'm curious how you come to the conclusion that high-quality video content cannot work better for "the vast majority of students" than sitting in a lecture hall. Do you have any theories about what kind of student good video content can work well for?
I didn’t make this claim. I said that videos like 3Blue1Brown’s videos would not work in the classroom for most students. I further said that there was a reason things are done the way they are.
Imagine going to a place of business and seeing people doing their job. A job you’ve never done before. You start giving advice on what they should do. Most likely your views would not carry much weight or be worth much consideration.
Really? Whats the reason?
In that sense I agree with you: videos won't do the job.
On the other hand there is this one guy making videos that, I believe, reached way more people than any single teacher would. How does that count for scale?
Can we agree that there is room for both and that these videos are a nice addition?
What methods of teaching will work for those who don’t want to do the work to be mathematically literate?