If anything, the video only made them more confident about their own ideas.

Subjects said they didn’t pay attention to the video because they thought they already knew the answer. In tests taken after watching the video, subjects provided essentially the same description as before. Then he showed them a short video that explained gravitational force. In experiments, he asked subjects to describe the force acting upon a ball when a juggler tosses it into the air. While praising the academy’s founder, Salman Khan, for his teaching and speaking talent, Muller contends that students actually don’t learn anything from science videos in general.

He launches right in, lecture style, with a gentle attack on the Khan Academy, which has famously flooded the Internet with free instructional videos on every subject from arithmetic to finance. It’s no small irony that Muller’s argument, that online instructional videos don’t work, has reached its biggest audience in the form of an online video. Muller curates the science blog Veritasium and received his Ph.D. If you ever wondered whether professional scientists are skeptical about some of the incredibly fun, attractive and brief online videos that purport to explain scientific principles in a few minutes, you’d be right.ĭerek Muller completed his doctoral dissertation by researching the question of what makes for effective multimedia to teach physics.

Khan academy learning to read