Academa

Ask for something technical. Get a lecture video made for you in ~25 minutes.

Online STEM education is, in practice, a library of lecture videos. Think Khan Academy, Udemy, Coursera, MIT OpenCourseWare, YouTube, etc.

Producing a good lecture video is really hard. But let's say you managed to do it. Two weeks later, you notice a mistake. Now you have a problem: the video is already finished, and you cannot go back and fix it. In practice, you either leave the video as it is or go back into production and make it again.

While thinking about this problem, a thought occurred to us.

We write code and ship it, but later, we find mistakes, fix them, and ship a new version.

What if we could do the same with lecture videos? What if we wrote lecture videos as source code so that they are maintainable?

Start with what the teacher actually does. The teacher says something, writes an equation, circles a term, then keeps talking. Each of those actions can be described as code:

Now imagine there is a compiler that takes this source code and makes a video from it, with text to speech and computer graphics.

Now the lecture becomes something you can edit and improve over time, just like software.

The idea of lecture videos as code is already powerful on its own. But in the era of AI, you get something much more powerful.