Philipp Schmidt discusses one of the takeaways from Logan that I found interesting as well — students love to watch video at increased speed when offered the option, e.g. watch an hour lecture in 45 minutes by playing it at 150% speed:

One factoid from the Open Ed conference in Utah that has been banging around the inside of my head is this: Apparently students that access video lectures online like to speed them up. At the University of Taiwan, students watch calculus lectures between 1.6 and 2 times faster than they were recorded. Willem from the TU Delft reported that one of their students’ most used features was the ability to play the videos at double speed. And someone from MIT said the same was true for users of MIT OpenCourseWare.

I, like Philipp, had assumed they were doing this as a sort of review — having seen the lectures in class, they were refreshing their memory for a test. But Philipp points out this can’t always be the case:

For some of these speed freaks, the videos are clearly repetition of materials that they have already learned, and they are just skimming through them in preparation for an exam. But many of the users in Taiwan did not even show up for the exam (the courses were not mandatory). Also, in Taiwan it turned out that all of the users who liked to go faster, lived in the same dorm – nobody who lived outside of the dorm had come up with the idea.

So a question — are we seeing a new sort of behavior? Students skimming lectures on a first viewing, the way they might skim a textbook on the first reading? And, if so, how does that alter our perception of what we are doing with OCW?

More over at Philipp’s blog.