Too long

Hey Ramario,

Sorry for long wait. :( The next stage should be out later this week. See our Roadmap for dates: http://teamtreehouse.com/roadmap

Putting together high quality videos and code challenges takes a ton of work. We have a dedicated team of teachers and a dedicated team of video professionals that work hard to create everything in a timely fashion.

Would you prefer we released entire projects at one time, rather than in stages? This would mean it would be a much longer gap between content releases (about 2-3 months) but everything would come at once. We're kicking around this idea internally, so I'd appreciate your thoughts!

I'll bite on this Nick. I agree that the pace of Treehouse is its achilles heel. An interesting side effect of this is that more advanced learners see Treehouse's current offering as too basic, but putting out advanced courses while the beginner courses aren't comprehensive would be putting the cart before the horse.

Treehouse is unique in how it approaches online learning, other successful sites like Lynda outsource their course creation to industry professionals allowing for course production to be an embarrassingly parallel problem. CodeSchool side stepped the issue by targeting advanced developers from the get go, avoiding focusing on entry level courses as much allowing them to get a comprehensive library up quickly.

Treehouse obviously has invested a lot of time into their video production, and having a distributed and/or elastic team of video teachers (a la Lynda) would put a lot of that money to waste. Treehouse either needs to take a sizeable hit by changing its production model entirely, allow the pace to remain slower than ideal or optimize their existing video pipeline.

I would be interested to hear what the Treehouse team would think of increasing the size of each video. Surely ten one minute videos are more expensive to plan, produce, edit, render, host and ultimately view than one ten minute video. This approach will also reduce the time necessary to onboard the viewer when a new video begins (last time we did XYZ). I personally think a mean of fifteen minutes to twenty minutes would be digestible enough for casual learning while posing advantages significant advantages to the website.

One more idea: post course updates more transparently. Whenever I see someone complain about pace, the standard response is "we're working on it, a bit behind schedule, we're sorry, etc.". A good idea might be to have a textual representation of each course on the course map, perhaps a summary that describes each video and an outline of where it is in the pipeline relative to the target release date. The current process is essentially opaque, whereas this increases the communication between client and provider AND allows people to intelligently skim content "Hmm, new badges are up. Let's read the blurb about them to see if I need to cover this.". This would introduce a logical segue to the concept of study guides, which would allow Treehouse members to have a list of ancillary resources to help with new concepts. An example of good study guide content would be exercises, relevant blog posts, books to look and what not.

I love the idea of Treehouse, it has just been slow of the start. Good luck.

And personal side note: please cut back the humour. Most of the time it comes off as forced and is distracting to the learning process. A cute brand is nice, (Mike is sweet) but sometimes it feels like the brand is being shoved down our throats,

I have to agree with Aaron's side note; the humor is a bit cheesy. I also think that producing longer videos sounds like a good idea. There may be, however, a reason why you guys at Treehouse decided not to.

A couple of great things to address here:

• Humor (English spelling) A groan is always better than a yawn. The aesthetic experience that I'm trying to get across on the production side is a kind of 'Hogwarts of Web Development' where both teacher personalities and characters can come across and enrich the experience – and also to differentiate Treehouse.

I'm sorry that you feel like the brand is being shoved down your throat – that sounds painful.

• Longer Videos If 10-20 minutes is the ideal length for an instructional episode, then that's something that needs to change in the way that we teach content and not with the way that it is produced or optimizing Video Output. On the production end, we produce content and edit it to the length of the completed scripts.

• Optimizing the Video Pipeline From my own perspective, I think that the 'brick wall' of the user experience is unfinished projects – which Nick addressed a bit in his reply. Having a 'where is this video in the pipeline' experience transforms Treehouse members into Project Managers. We produce a lot of content every month, but if it isn't the content area that you care about then you feel like you're waiting.

If we were releasing 'Completed Projects' instead of 'Stages' you wouldn't feel like there was a waiting period – as the product would be released as a completed unit. We started releasing stages because it was the most atomic level of content – and it made sense for our pedagogy.

If I may chime in here from the opposite side of the fence.

• Humour - I like it actually. You can find a great number of videos on the web that are dry and boring. When you inject humour into a lesson - even if it is a bad joke - it breaks up the monotony, and you will most likely remember the lesson. Take Jason's crazy sign-off smile as an example. It freaks you out and makes you laugh at the same time. I've found that the dynamic between Jim and Jason seems to work the best so far - Jim's the straight-man, and Jason's the funny-man....which keeps things at a pretty good balance.

• Longer Videos - I think the topics themselves should dictate the length of the video. Breaking down a larger complex topic into smaller digestible chunks is something I think that Treehouse has done quite well so far.

• Optimizing the Video Pipeline - I like the idea of having guest authors, but it would be extremely difficult to maintain the high production quality even if the author had his own studio setup. The treehouse videos aren't just screencasts.

Maybe they could do a screencast series if it means that it will generate enough content to keep people happy.

I really enjoy the Treehouse Show as well and look forward to seeing these.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the content on Treehouse - I've seen a conscious effort to increase the rate of releases and to expand the breadth of the content. I hope that we'll continue to see more advanced topics in Ruby, Rails, and also Python.

Just wanted to stop in and say "thanks" for the feedback! Everybody has different opinions of how long the videos should be, and we typically aim for 5-10 minutes to keep them short and digestible. But it's important to keep evaluating everything we do to make sure we are meeting all your needs, and if more and more people ask for longer videos then that is something we will definitely consider.

As for the release schedule, it's a good reminder to hear that things are taking too long from your perspective because it helps us as teachers focus on what's most important to you. Things were slow lately because of a holiday break but every course should be picking up steam as we're all back in the thick of production again.

Also, as we've built (and continue to build) a strong foundation for beginners we can now start to delve into more advanced concepts to build out our offerings as well as look for new subjects to expand into based on feedback from the members. So keep the feedback coming, and we'll continue to push for high quality content delivered in a timely manner!

"A groan is always better than a yawn." That may be true but does it have to be either/or? There are a lot of older videos that don't have the painful humor but I personally did not find them boring at all. Maybe because I was truly interested in learning what Nick was teaching.

Some of them aren't bad, but this one is really over the top.

http://teamtreehouse.com/library/websites/how-to-make-a-blog/getting-started-with-wordpress/project-overview

Other than that, I really do enjoy Treehouse and the things I am learning.

I actually like the short videos and the cheesy humour.

Good lord is there anything worse than having to watch a long, dry, humourless video? I seriously wouldn't have the attention span for it, even if it was about 'how to hack into your ex's email after 12 Martinis'

The short videos provide a clean separation of topics and makes it much easier to find a particular point that needs to be reviewed instead of having to screen the whole material again. Keep it going TTH team! More WordPress, business and seo stuff would be awesome.

I have to agree with Maria and say that the start to that course was a bit too much for me. I don't mind if it's subtle, fairly quick or really funny but once it starts taking up time I want to be using to learn something then I want it to make as much use of the time as possible. Adding in characters is, for me, a bit too weird. I'm well aware I may be the majority though so just giving feedback and definitely not moaning.

Zac did accept on the FB forum that it may have been a bit much and was very good with hearing feedback so I'm sure he'll keep that in mind for future videos :)

EDIT: And as Chris has shown above me, everyone wants different things so it must be fairly tricky to figure out the best route to take for the majority. I'm sure Treehouse will listen to everyone and try and do their best for every user.

I really appreciate all of you Treehouse Members weighing in on this. Especially Aaron's long reply.

This is a big discussion we're having internally and we'll be communicating about any changes to our process.

We value every single one of you and are hustling our asses off to deliver the best learning tool we can make for you all.

This is a direct response to Michael.

• Humour (Silly Spelling) I agree that there can be a bit of a charm to awkward humour, but the execution seems to fall flat from the videos I have seen (mainly iOS videos). I would very much like to have videos with a good element of humour in them, and removing the jokes all together is likely a bad decision. This was more of a suggestion to alter the execution.

• Longer Videos

“If 10-20 minutes is the ideal length for an instructional episode, then that's something that needs to change in the way that we teach content and not with the way that it is produced or optimizing Video Output. On the production end, we produce content and edit it to the length of the completed scripts.”

I quoted the above because it is exactly what I was hoping to get across. It would be a horrible experience to take 10 minutes worth of the existing footage and mash videos together until you're within an acceptable range. Perhaps future scripts could experiment with different lengths to find an ideal balance?

• Optimizing the Video Pipeline a couple fair points. Might be useful to survey members to see if their issues with pacing are made worse via the current releasing mechanism.
  

And as an addition:

• Super Bonus Content Regarding iOS

It is a shame that Amit's badges on iOS 4, 5, etc need to be archived/retired when a new iOS schedule comes out. As an iOS developer, I believe there is enough material to warrant a separate Objective-C and Cocoa Touch set of badges that don't touch on version specific features. If modularity is maintained those badges could last a fair while and Amit's productivity could be aimed at other, version specific badges, without having to double back and cover the essentials.

• We have longer format videos in Treehouse Workshops, but they're currently running about 40 minutes. The only content that we have regularly running in the 10-20 range is The Treehouse Show, which runs just over 10. From when we were Think Vitamin Membership we've tried to get content under 10 – and if necessary add a Part 2/3/etc.

If we were to adapt content and make it shorter, I would want to make those changes to Workshops. Right now Workshops tend to be longer – but we could make them shorter format experiments. Have you seen Jim's Angular.JS Workshop? It's just under an hour.

However Andrew's jQuery Workshop is only 14 minutes: http://teamtreehouse.com/library/treehouse-workshops/creating-a-jquery-plugin

It may be that the Workshop sweet spot is 10-20 minutes – right now we need to live with them a little longer to know what people are watching and when they tune out.

• We're going to do Video Release experiments this year – if they're successful we'll likely change how we release content. My gut tells me that people want 'completed projects' but we're going to do what the data tells us.

• I wish that I could make iOS funny. If you have any ideas, please email me! I think we all know what we're talking about – it's the first video in the series – and it has too many diversions – I've been debating making that cut for a while.

:(

-Michael

Everything related to iOS is HILARIOUS.

- Android Teacher ;)

@Aaron, just wanted to comment on this:

"It would be a horrible experience to take 10 minutes worth of the existing footage and mash videos together until you're within an acceptable range. Perhaps future scripts could experiment with different lengths to find an ideal balance?"

I don't think our process around this was clearly spelled out in the previous posts. We aim to keep our videos shorter in general. When longer topics do run on we try to split it up when writing or chop it into two or more parts in editing. At no point does the video team mash any footage together, though. :)

Anyhow, it's good to hear all this feedback, and I am personally taking it into account with the stuff I'm working on right now. While we won't be able to make everyone happy with our format, hopefully we can find the right balance, and we need you all to tell us what that is!

" I wish that I could make iOS funny. If you have any ideas, please email me! I think we all know what we're talking about – it's the first video in the series – and it has too many diversions – I've been debating making that cut for a while. "

Challenge accepted ;)

@Ben Jakuben "Everything related to iOS is HILARIOUS. - Android Teacher ;)" Mental high five.... ;) we need some thumbs on this forum

As long as we include a 'thumbs down'.

I personally like most of the HUMOUR/HUMOR ( I agree with Maria though ...Dr. Plank Wattz was too far into the crazy, and not so funny) - however, overall, I like the humor - that's one of many things that sets you guys apart from sites like Lynda.com! Lynda has good content to be fair, and tons of it, but it is dry and less organized, and I'm too "ADD" to stick with it.

I think you have something that other sites I've seen so far do not - keep up the good work. The fact that people are asking for more stuff, and quickly, is a testament to the fact that they like what they have seen - I'm just starting out so I haven't reached your video limit by a long shot, but as much as I can see that being a possible draw-back, I would hate to see TreeHouse speed up too much at the expense of quality - otherwise you will be just one of a bunch.

nevermind!