2 thoughts on “#27: Ten Points I Learned at Lynda.com”

  1. Hi Steve. I agree that one needs to be concise even to the point where you think you are losing content. There is never enough time to cram everything you want in a tutorial. Even if you are the best speaker, teacher and presenter, people only have a limited attention span due to numerous reasons. It is better to break up a long tutorial (like those found on Lynda and Pluralsight) so people can scan for a subtopic easier.

    Tutorials are very difficult to do well. The day I decided to start paying for Swift tutorials and ditch the Youtube stuff, my learning productivity went up at least by a factor of three. People who are only learning from free tutorials may scoff at this factor, but I am serious. Give the pay services a a try for a month. The first month is free and you can watch a lot of videos in a month. For those who are learning Swift or iOS or general programming concepts, I highly recommend watching Simon Allardice’s videos. Simon sets an extremely high bar. Another ace presenter is Greg Heo from Ray Wenderlich. Unfortunately, his Swift 2 tutorials are now a bit dated with the insane pace of Swift upgrading but if you want to learn how to do training tutorials check Greg out as well as Simon.

    You also mention simultaneously typing code and talking about the code si a nightmare. I had the pleasure of attending IndieDevStock in Nashville last month and watching Simon and Greg give presentations. I don’t know how they do this so well. You also mention enunciation is very important and I can’t agree with this more to reduce listener fatigue and loss of listening focus. Enunciation and speed of delivery is very important and you can’t talk to quickly or slowly lest you lose the listener. If you are creating a video for services which offer 1/2x to 2x playback speed, you want to deliver your 1x recording more slowly with emphasized enunciation so that when you go up to 2x, the listener can still understand ALL the words. Don’t worry about the slower speeds since I challenge anyone to admit they listen to slower than 1x. haha. : ). When listening to Simon speak live, I noticed that his pace is quicker than his 1x video pace. Asked him about this and he confirmed my thoughts.

    I am looking forward to your future endeavors Steve. : ). – Richard W.

    Reply

Leave a Reply