How to complete a college course in one day. It’s technically possible and I will explain how this works.

Truth be told, this isn’t for everyone. There are some pre-requisites, and you have to be a focused learner. Unfortunately, much of what you learn within a day will not make it from your working memory into your long term memory. It is proven to be much more effective to space out your learning, and will improve the odds of you retaining this info, to avoid it disappearing into the ether. A better approach would be to do 5 classes in 5 days.

Scott Young has documented some interesting techniques in accelerated learning, with his MIT Challenge. You may know of the details. To summarize, he completed 32 CS classes in 12 months.

The course we’re talking about in this post is:
Algorithm Design and Analysis, Penn Engineering, University of Pennsylvania

• video play time: 8.5hrs
• word count: ~84,500
• approx: 165 WPM

Conclusion: if you can read faster than 165wpm, it is faster to read.

Average adult reads prose text at 250 to 300 words per minute (wpm). By contrast, the average rate of speech for English speakers is ~150 wpm, with slide presentations often closer to 100 wpm. As a result, when given the choice, many viewers speed up video playback to ~1.3~1.5 its recorded rate to compensate for the difference.

The transcripts are available for all the videos. You can listen to Audible recordings at up to 3x the normal speed. The platform at edX only goes up to 2x, but you don’t get this feature all the time. For example, I don’t think you can adjust the speed of the video when casting it. Reading has many other advantages. You can skim through less relevant parts, and read slowly through the more complicated bits. It’s easier to reread things you don’t understand. Considerably easier than scrubbing back in a video. Reading doesn’t come with the overhead of having to watch and listen. You can read in silence and without using headphones. You can highlight and copy/paste things to combine with notes.

Videos are great because they are more hands-free. It’s easier to watch or listen at the gym, walking, and doing other activities. You can be in the shower, on the train, riding your bike.. all places where audio is superior to text.

The total playlist for all videos in this course is about 8.5hrs. I took all the transcripts, ran them through some perl scripts to format the text. Inserted page breaks after each lesson, replaced line breaks with a space, inserted the filename at the top of each page, and converted it into an epub. Reading the lessons was a much better experience, very liberating. Reading can be tricky because you want to follow along in the slides, and the text doesn’t give you any indication of what content will trigger a new slide.

We retain information better when we understand the big picture, and can incorporate both focused and diffused modes of thinking. Reading the course also helps with other strategies involving with spaced repetition and deliberate practice. You can schedule notes to review at a later point in time, and hammer into the parts you don’t understand. Video requires a lot more interaction if you want to pause the video, replay bits, and jump to different parts. Text overall is much more accessible.

The main advantage is the time saved. The total word count for this class is about 84.5k. Reading at 500 WPM means you have about 2.8hrs of text. Even if you watch the video at 2x speed, it’s still faster than the 4.25hrs of video.

Somebody who has some understanding of Algorithm design, can complete this course faster than somebody who has never seen it before. There are prerequisites to the course, but the only thing determining whether an individual can acquire the information covered in this course, is the individual. It seems obvious an online course is far superior to an in-person lecture for many reasons, other than logistically. For one, if you don’t fully understand something you can reread or rewatch it. You don’t get that in a class. You could ask the instructor in small classes and where that’s permitted, but that luxury is often overrated.

Here’s a link to the course: https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:PennX+SD3x+3T2019/