Written versions of Calculus, YouTube shorts, and other lesson supplements

Hey 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?