Learning from videos: Tips from my daughter

I had a conversation with my daughter a week ago about how I could learn from YouTube videos more effectively. Through COVID, and since the pandemic, the younger generation has been forced to learn using videos and in virtual settings; I am an older learner who likes the heft of a textbook (with highlights, underlines, and notes in the margins) and being in a class full of people!

There was surely something for me to gain from my daughter about how to learn using videos. This wasn’t a theoretical conversation: I was looking to teach myself more about Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT, and most of the resources were on YouTube. I had tried before, but I found learning from videos challenging: I would watch them as entertainment (and would invariably fall asleep), I struggled to hold my attention, and my recall for any details after watching videos was terrible.

Here’s what my daughter told me, and how it has worked out for me in the past week of trying her suggestions…

Videos bring a lot to the table:

1. Engagement: With visuals, animations, and sound, videos can make learning more engaging and fun.

2. Quick Information: Videos often provide information quickly and concisely, saving you time.

3. Demonstrations: Perfect for showing processes and practical applications that are hard to grasp through text alone.

I knew all this, but how do you start learning from videos effectively, especially if you’ve always been a textbook kind of person? Here are some tips from my daughter…

1. Videos for information, Reading for entertainment: This blew my mind & felt backward, but this is the view my daughter said her generation has on videos… that videos are quick and to-the-point and great for learning, and reading is leisurely, and so for entertainment!

2. Treat videos like lectures: Approach video learning as if you’re attending a lecture. Take notes, pause to reflect, and don’t binge-watch too many in one go — you’ll just tire yourself.

   1. Pause and Rewind: In general, I found the pace of videos & the volume of information coming at me too fast; books (and reading) was self-paced. The trick to make videos self-paced is pause and rewind! Don’t hesitate to pause and rewind videos to catch every detail and make videos self-paced.

   2. Take Notes: Just like with textbooks and lectures, jotting down notes helps reinforce what you’ve learned. My daughter insisted that I should take copious notes while watching a video.

   3. One-Time Viewing with Pauses: Aim to get the full understanding in one go, using pauses and rewinds as necessary. It is unlikely that you’ll attend a lecture multiple times, treat videos the same way.

   4. Set a Learning Schedule: Allocate a specific time for watching educational videos to build a routine, just like you may have in college for lectures.

   5. Watch at Normal Speed: Resist the urge to speed up the video to 1.2x or 1.5x. Watching at the intended pace ensures you catch all the details. Use pause-and-rewind rather than speed up / slow down.

3. Keep the focus:

   1. Sit at a desk: It is tempting to watch videos on television or while lying on your couch (that’s my recipe to fall asleep fast). However, my daughter suggested it was best that I sit at a desk and treat videos seriously instead of kidding myself that I was learning while watching something on TV.

   2. Avoid Distractions: Make sure you’re in a quiet space and take notes to keep your focus. Pause often to ensure you’ve understood the content.

   3. Explore Related Content: If a topic piques your interest, open a new tab and dive deeper. But remember to come back to your original video to stay on track. Don’t fall into endless rabbit-holes…

   4. Skip the Shorts: For serious learning, avoid short, bite-sized videos. They’re more for quick entertainment than in-depth learning

4. Choose quality content by using the right keywords: Learning to search effectively is key. Good keywords help you find high-quality content quickly, “As you search more, you’ll see the kind of keywords the YouTubers you like use, and you can use those to find more such videos”. High view counts and positive reviews are also good indicators. Skip bad content fast, and pause and learn from good content.

5. Review and reflect: Ask yourself questions, and think about how the new information fits with what you already know. Pause during videos when a concept is hard and move on only when you have understood or internalized it. At the end of a video, review your notes, reflect on them, and summarize your notes to see if you understood the material, before moving on to the next video.

I’ve been following these strategies in the last week, and have benefitted from many of these tips. I’ve been sitting at a desk, taking notes, pausing and rewinding a lot, and reviewing my notes daily. I find that I am more serious about learning & more focused while learning; the big shift for me was “Videos for learning, reading for entertainment”!

The other takeaway for me has been: you have to pause and slow down for videos to be effective; and you’ll find when you pause and slow down that it is actually much faster than reading books. Overall, it has been a good learning experience for me, and I think I’ll try and shift more to video learning (while supplanting my learning with books while I transition!).

I dove into the world of AI & ChatGPT based off my own reflections on AI in last week’s post. I wanted to both learn some internals, as well as specifics on ChatGPT. Here are the YouTube resources I’ve benefitted from…

1. The excellent Deep Learning series from 3blue1brown to learn more about internals from a mathematical perspective.

2. The fantastic “Practical Deep Learning for Coders” course by Fast.AI — very easy paced, practical, and starts with examples.

3. The deep, detailed, technical Neural Networks: Zero to Hero playlist from Andrej Karpathy

4. Two recent videos from OpenAI dev day to learn more about OpenAI APIs and Platform tools and capabilities. The “New Products Deep Dive” video & “The New Stack and Ops for AI” videos were both good.

So, I have been using ChatGPT a fair bit, both to research colleges for my daughter, and for other purposes. I did upload a fair bit of my own writing to ChatGPT and train it on my writing style. So the quiz for you is… how much of this post was written by me, and how much by a Custom GPT trained on my writing style?!

I heard this album multiple times in the background while playing around with ChatGPT during the last week: it’s not a band I had heard of, and I quite enjoyed the hard-rock and bluesy feel to the album.

Till next week, keep reading and keep learning (both from videos, and from the younger generation!)