Why won't you learn?

On airline safety briefings, workplace training, and the problem of low information density sucking up the time of high-speed learners

David Burbach, who is an associate professor at the Naval War College, notes that his career requires him to welcome the new school year with a "1.5 hour active shooter training video for a transcript that takes 10 min to read in full". Different people learn via different modes, of course, but it should enter at least someone's consideration that most college graduates -- especially those with post-graduate degrees -- have, almost by definition, learned how to digest lots of information from written texts.

■ Thus, if required to undergo 90 minutes of training that can be read in ten minutes, members of that audience are likely to be so bored by the low information density of the recorded training that they might actually end up resisting the content they are supposed to be learning.

■ The excruciatingly low quality of training for adults in low-stakes learning environments (like workplace safety training and required continuing-education programs) is practically a crime. Online videos -- especially when clumsily animated, as so many are -- mostly take bad teaching habits and make them worse through low information density.

■ A fast talker can reach sustained rates of about 150 to 200 words per minute, though when those words are delivered for an audience, they are often imperfectly chosen. This rate is safely below even the conservative estimates of up to 300 words per minute that adults can generally read, which itself is much lower than what a college-practiced "skimmer" can generally glean.

■ Not all written content is of the same quality, of course. Some is garbage (even when it wasn't written by artificial intelligence). Some is sublime. But with careful thought and editing, it's rare to find content that can't be delivered at least as well in text form as can be delivered in a video -- after all, what is the transcript of a video but a text?

■ 90% of online training videos would be better as carefully-scripted, spokesperson-direct-to-camera recordings, interspersed when necessary with pictures and videos. And 90% of those would be better if the scripts were just converted to attractive printed pamphlets, laid out thoughtfully for optimal knowledge transfer (for instance, in the Edward Tufte format).

■ Alas, low-stakes learning is all too often treated as nothing more than an afterthought or a chore to be grudgingly completed by all parties involved, even when it involves matters of life and death, like airline safety briefings. If we were to really embrace "lifelong learning", as well we should, perhaps we would invest better in delivering better content for people to absorb once they're outside of conventional classroom settings.

■ Assuming that most people graduate sometime in their twenties and work for around forty years, wouldn't it make sense to put at least twice the thought into that full-life-cycle education as we put into "school" education?