3blue1brown
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Written versions of Calculus, YouTube shorts, and other lesson supplements
🕑 Added 2023-12-18 21:17:21 +0000 UTCHey everyone,
I wanted to pass along a few quick updates on a few projects that supplement the core lessons. My main focus continues to be researching/animating the main videos, these are all projects that can be cleanly outsourced, thanks predominantly to the contributions of Patrons like you.
Written version of the Calculus series
Thanks to the contributions of Kurt Bruns, the calculus series is now fully available in written form. I’m curious to hear your thoughts, especially from those of you who are teachers, on whether these sorts of written versions of lessons are useful.
Here are my motivations:
- For mathematical topics, I often prefer to read than to watch videos. This is especially true if I’m looking back at something I’ve once learned before, where I may want to easily skim ahead and search for things. For anyone else who feels similarly, it can’t hurt to have these as a supplemental resource.
- It’s nice to intersperse lessons with little comprehension quizzes in a way that you can’t do on a YouTube video. Plus, for any future settings where it makes sense to pair videos with comprehension questions, say if YouTube introduces this into their course feature, it can’t hurt to have the questions already made.
- I’ve had nebulous thoughts about one day expanding the calculus and linear algebra series and printing them as books. Such a future is made slightly easier by having the existing content already in written form, with cleaned-up static imagery.
Those of you following in 2021 may remember how a small pack of interns converted many other old lessons this way. The Neural Network miniseries, for example, is available in a written and interactive form, along with around 30 other lessons. My conclusion is that interactivity is fun, but rarely actually worth it. The more valuable additions are the comprehension questions. What are your thoughts?
Oh, Shorts.
Boy, do I have mixed feelings about short-form videos. Many individual such videos are truly wonderful, but it's hard not to feel a little depressed when thinking about people indefinitely scrolling through one-minute videos in an onslaught of rapid dopamine hits and context switching.
Since early this year, an external editor Dawid Kołodziej has helped to convert excerpts from past lessons into short-form videos suitable for TikTok, YouTube shorts, etc.
Initially, I was posting these on a separate YouTube channel, but more recently, I've been moving those shorts onto the main channel. Essentially this is because there's a nice feature I can use that lets people click on a link at the bottom of a short to go to the full video, but only if it's a full video from the same channel. Also, I recently learned that it's possible to post videos without notifying subscribers. 8 years I've been on YouTube and I had no idea!
I don't love the idea of contributing to the wave of short-form videos taking over, and whatever implication this might have for attention spans. However, I do love the idea of providing a kind of escape hatch from the shorts feed (state as much here). If the videos are at all successful in piquing someone's curiosity, they're just a click away from leaving that feed and landing on the full lesson.
Even just two weeks into the experiment, it's clear that they really do work effectively for this purpose. 13.1% of all traffic on long-form videos in the last week came directly from this "related video" thing at the bottom of shorts. It's hard to measure how much comes indirectly (e.g. someone clicks on the channel or subscribes while watching a short, and later returns to watch more), but watch time on long-form videos on the channel at the moment is roughly 2x what it usually is.
Associated quizzes
A start-up named Retainit reached out asking about creating associated quizzes for 3b1b videos in their app. Here’s the sample they provided for a relatively short video, on comprehending what running a computation 2^256 times would entail.
What are your opinions on this kind of supplement? Would you use it?
Comments
Seung Uk Jang
For the written version of the Calculus series, is there any prospective plan to have translated versions of that? I reckon that your videos were widespread in various languages, and perhaps the written versions can also be distributed in that way.
Dachannien
The shorts aren't all that bad. Dawid is doing a great job picking the material for them. I'm glad it's driving traffic to your full videos, because there's so much gold there that people need to see. At least it's your voice in the shorts, and not that fake TikTok voice that makes me want to throw other people's phones out the window!
Ben Handley
I love the written form of the Calculus content. I think having some sort of test-to-progress is a good idea, even if not hard-enforced, to encourage students to work at their level. I sometimes hear from school students who claim to be interested in complex analysis or similar, and say they are learning it by watching videos, and I know they're not at that level yet. So something to help students get guided to the appropriate content, rather than being tempted by the most interesting/advanced, is a good idea. I can't tell whether retainit will deliver on that aspect.
Soumyadeep Mukherjee
sample's pretty neat. could be like a course / video interrupted quiz. and based on the content of past say 5/7 minutes, answer them and carry on
3blue1brown
Interesting data point, thanks for sharing!
3blue1brown
100%, whatever format such side projects take, a pretty high priority for me is to be sure almost all my focus can remain on new videos.
Frank Leake
The written form looks excellent from a quick peruse and would compliment the video nicely. On shorts, well call me a shorts Nazi but I hate them, but as others have pointed out, it's up there with advertising and sponsorship, you have to make a reasoned decision about whether *you* think it will help the channel, in my opinion one of the best channels on Youtube. Will I be watching the shorts? No, not while the long form exists so I can spend half hour or more having my brain stretched to breaking point :-)
Euro Micelli
I’ll give you one datapoint about your recent shorts and it’s effect on long-video viewings. Take it with a grain of salt. More than once in the last couple of weeks I’ve been offered a short from you, I’ve recognized the video topic, and I’ve told myself: “I remember that one, it was very good. I feel like watching it again.” I’ll watch the short, and then jump to the long one for the full experience. Or, alternatively: “what was that one about?” Clicked on short, remembered the video, to the same effect. I wonder if a lot of those viewing are due to old time subscribers like me just being enticed to watch them again. I don’t know if YouTube gives you the data to distinguish between new views and re-watches.
Jordan Brown
I like the written calculus notes, well done to you and Kurt for making those. Retainit is interesting. My general advice here is to partner with an established platform like brilliant or khan academy. I think you should aim to offload maintenance/infrastructure and focus on creating beautiful articulations.
Bartosz Błaszkiewicz
Pozdrów Dawida. Miło zobaczyć znajome nazwisko :-) Anyway... shorts. You need them to reach audience. That's how YouTube works. It's their choice, not yours. Otherwise you will fall into obscureness. Don't feel guilty. Personally I actively avoid the shorts for reasons you stated (and others but it's late where I live - I should go to sleep and not write that essay again).
Agbaeze Henry
Nice, I like these written versions a lot, it really helps me stop and think a bit more than when I binge the videos. I wonder if you could give us use these as a course with a little pie certificate ): ha! just for motivation -oh, maybe this is what Retainit can offer
Kamil
Can't wait for your calculus book(s) since it's much easier for me to focus on printed content.
