What is the best way for developers to learn new software tools? An empirical comparison between a text and a video tutorial
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Human-Computer Interaction, Software Engineering
- Keywords
- comparison, text tutorial, software, spreadsheet, video tutorial
- Copyright
- © 2016 Käfer et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. What is the best way for developers to learn new software tools? An empirical comparison between a text and a video tutorial. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2413v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2413v1
Abstract
Tutorials for software developers are supposed to help them to adapt to new tools quickly. While in the early days of computing, mostly text tutorials were available, nowadays software developers can choose among a huge number of tutorials for almost any popular software tool. However, almost no research was conducted to understand how text tutorials differ from other tutorials, which tutorial types are preferred and, especially, which tutorial types yield the best learning experience in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.
To evaluate these questions, we converted a “proven” video tutorial for a novel software tool into a content-equivalent text tutorial. We then conducted an experiment in three groups where 42 undergraduate students from a software engineering course were commissioned to operate the software tool after using a tutorial: the first group was provided only with the video tutorial, the second group only with the text tutorial and the third group with both.
Surprisingly, the differences in terms of efficiency are almost negligible: we could observe that participants using only the text tutorial completed the tutorial faster than the participants with the video tutorial. However, the participants using only the video tutorial applied the learned content faster, achieving roughly the same bottom line performance. We also found that if both tutorial types are offered, participants clearly prefer video tutorials for learning new content but text tutorials for looking up “missed” information. So while it would be ideal if software tool makers would offer both tutorial types, we think that it is more efficient to produce only text tutorials – provided you manage to motivate developers to use them.
Author Comment
Tutorials for software developers are supposed to help them to adapt to new tools quickly. While in the early days of computing, mostly text tutorials were available, nowadays software developers can choose among a huge number of tutorials for almost any popular software tool. However, almost no research was conducted to understand how text tutorials differ from other tutorials, which tutorial types are preferred and, especially, which tutorial types yield the best learning experience in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.
To evaluate these questions, we converted a “proven” video tutorial for a novel software tool into a content-equivalent text tutorial. We then conducted an experiment in three groups where 42 undergraduate students from a software engineering course were commissioned to operate the software tool after using a tutorial: the first group was provided only with the video tutorial, the second group only with the text tutorial and the third group with both.
Surprisingly, the differences in terms of efficiency are almost negligible: we could observe that participants using only the text tutorial completed the tutorial faster than the participants with the video tutorial. However, the participants using only the video tutorial applied the learned content faster, achieving roughly the same bottom line performance. We also found that if both tutorial types are offered, participants clearly prefer video tutorials for learning new content but text tutorials for looking up “missed” information. So while it would be ideal if software tool makers would offer both tutorial types, we think that it is more efficient to produce only text tutorials – provided you manage to motivate developers to use them.