Which Educational Content Is More Favored By Developers Between Video And Written Content?

I was pondering recently on the evolution of educational content over the years, at some point in history, the only way to teach was to verbally tell people who are within earshot what you want them to know, we gradually progressed to writing, then print, then video and more ways of learning have been created by fusing aspects of the previously mentioned learning media. These days we have augmented reality and gaming being used as a means of education.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERS MAKE USE OF DIFFERENT LEARNING CONTENT

Written content (and its derivative in form of print or web content) has been the most consumed form of media for as long as the books of history can remember. However, with over 720,000 hours of video uploaded to YouTube daily, educational platforms like LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, Pluralsight and others, I began to wonder if written content will be displaced in the near future. Software engineers rely on a blend of written and video content in learning as of today.

WRITTEN CONTENT HAS MORE PRACTICAL USES THAN VIDEO CONTENT

I do believe that while video learning is really amazing, it'll be a while before written content is displaced (at least for software engineers) and this is because we read faster than we watch. A lot of times when software engineers search for things online, we're usually pressed for time and just need something we can copy, paste and edit to make some part of our code work. You can't copy code you see in a video without having to type it out yourself, also the time spent skimming through the video to find exactly what one is looking for is quite discouraging when you're in a bind.

SEARCHES QUERIES ARE EFFICIENT BECAUSE OF WEB CRAWLERS

The way online search queries work is such that the web crawler indexes words in such a way that when you search for a particular thing, you're redirected to written content that has matching words with your search query. As of now, machines aren't very good at watching videos as such your searches are most likely to be spot on with written content than with video content. This alone positions written content as the more favoured choice when in need of a quick fix. Tech blogs (like Hashnode) are now on the rise, providing new content that addresses new concerns and teaches new things as they come up. Video content takes a lot longer to produce and that's also something worth considering in the tussle between written content and video content.