Show HN: Anki/Duolingo-like app using educational YouTube videos (platoedu.org)
Hi HN,
I watch A LOT of educational YouTube videos but wasn't forgetting a good chunk of the details because I was only really passively watching. So I made a tool that generates quiz questions/flashcards from YouTube videos, and uses spaced repetition like Anki or Duolingo to keep it in memory.
Let me know if you find it cool/useful (or terrible ) or if you want to know a bit about the details!
101 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadFor example, under 'Physics', we have "The big lie about carbon capture', 'Why (toilet) flushing isn't for everyone', 'The scientific basis for miracles', etc.
One of my future plans is to actually train a BERT model to limit the video suggestions to something that actually is useful instead of clickbait... I have 2 different accounts on YouTube just so watching random videos on 1 won't pollute the suggestions from the other
I too often watch these kinds of videos without really retaining a lot. This is a perfect complement to turn infotainment into time well spent, or at least, less wasted.
But for the next version I want to use something called knowledge tracing to determine an estimated level of recall to then change the spacing
I'm guessing it only really works well on scripts that are meant to be educational, because there already are "questions" implicit in the transcript of the video because that's the best way to present information when teaching something
I know you've addressed the video selection in the playlists, but I would highly suggest doing something to get it to differentiate "educational entertainment" videos (I notice a lot of Real Engineering and Economics Explained and CGP Grey videos) and actual education videos: primary-source explainers from teachers and subject-matter experts. The information density in the latter is way higher, and I think people overestimate the educational value of the former.
I disagree. Some people might overestimate how in-depth the information is, but the educational value of these videos lies in giving someone a basic understanding of something they otherwise wouldn't have learnt about at all. The lower information density helps making the video easier to understand and thus easier to consume, compared to something like a Havard class.
If you want to learn something in-depth, an actual class, a book, etc. will of course always be better, but if that's neither required nor wanted, the infotainment is just fine.
I have been wanting to build a YT front-end that lets me control how many "new" videos are recommended. New videos are the time-sinks.
Instead this new FE should make me re-watch so I absorb and retain better - maybe thru more Q&A like OP's platoedu or even make me write out some notes. Then I am forced to curate videos and maybe be more productive.
One of my ideas that's on the backburner is build a BERT classifier to separate between Educational, edu-tainment, and random, then use that to filter suggestions from the ones of people that use Plato
Anyway if you have any good suggestions for better educational content I'd love to add that to Plato over the categories I have now!
The YT algo is pretty good - it catches on to what I want to follow and magnifies (ie suggest more content on) that topic. But it never pushes me to educational videos.
I suspect educational videos are best to watch on Coursera. I know people who just open up Coursera and start listening on commutes, etc - instead of infi-scrolling.
The pedagogical (instruction techniques, content structure, etc) aspect in those vids is different. I wonder if there is inspiration for creators/topics from Coursera?
So I'd be cautious about an app that helps you memorize the contents of said videos. You might end up with a lot of superficial, clickbaity pieces of knowledge.
That's where you'll find actual knowledge and not in high production value videos which have to be financially viable for their creators.
It's hardly a secret that Youtube has a problem funding long form videos with a certain depth and instead favors clickbaity, short material. No reason to be offended.
As a rule of thumb I'd say everything with a sponsored segment is entertainment but too shallow for education.
Perfect list. Tech talks, university lectures (recorded videos) are almost as consumable as YT edu-tainment videos. Papers, books and textbooks are accessible but requires more motivation.
To the parent comment (zadokshi), if YT content is education, why don't the biggest creators make 5-10 videos on a topic, back-to-back? 5-10 is minimum for learning, example Coursera content - I'm not even comparing to semester/yearlong coursework at schools. Because there isn't a demand or incentive for that on YT.
Yes, this is actually something I've been thinking about quite a bit, I actually built out the playlist feature just this morning because it's easier to "show" how Plato works, but I basically just wrote some scripts to get some good enough videos for the demo
If you have any good channel suggestions I'd love to add them :))
One of the things I have on the backburner for now is building a BERT classifier to decide whether the video is Educational, Edu-tainment, or not educational at all and have a more customizable video suggestion than YouTube has (I actually have 2 accounts on YouTube, just so I can watch some random video on 1 without it polluting my education/learning heavy one)
One thing though, is I actually think both have their merit, while I agree the actual educational content is pretty different, the educational entertainment is a nice alternative to TikTok or IG reels when you just want to mindlessly scroll, I think there still often some useful content there, especially if you don't have any background in the area
I'm a bit surprised to only see like 3 questions for a 14 minute video of quantum mechanics. For educational videos with very dense information, is there a way to raise the questions per video rate?
Looking forward to see MIT OpenCourseware videos supported. Right now they are too long :D
Pm me (email in bio) and I can add some MIT OCW videos and turn on support for longer videos to your account
Small bug, the service requires a youtube.com URL and cannot handle an m.youtube.com URL, as happens when copying from a phone web browser or NewPipe. Perhaps you could support the mobile URL as well.
Thanks, great work!
Thanks for catching that! Will fix that!
However, I have recently transitioned towards becoming better at compiling information quickly rather than spending a chunk of my day memorizing facts that I am not quite sure will be useful.
What I'm trying to say is that I rarely go back to the scratchpad of a previous question / problem, but I will approach every question and problem with a new search.
Trying to save information for the sake of it without knowing what future use it is going to have stresses me out, so I find that this fresh scratchpad approach works best for me.
Granted, I’m aware this probably won’t scale to many topics but a few years and hundreds of notes later, it’s still working well for me.
Right now I'm doing this manually by copy/pasting into ChatGPT but I want to automate this aspect. I'm not very technical so any guidance you could provide would be helpful :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38555629