Lecture Speedup
Writing about the Chromium extension I wrote to make watching recorded lectures less painful, and sharing a speedrun that beat the official world record. 2022-02-17
The Issue With Lectures
Let's get right to the point; below is a list of what I hate most about conventional lectures, in which a single teacher speaks in front of a group of students.
- Teachers explaining using way too many examples and unnecessary details
- Student questions related to concepts they should've mastered already
- Teachers who clearly don't want to teach or who don't enjoy teaching
With a few years of lectures ahead of me, I knew I had to find some way to make my experience less miserable. This is where Lecture Speedup comes in.
Lecture Speedup
Lecture Speedup is a quick extension I made that injects key bindings onto any webpage containing a HTML video element through the JavaScript console. It works on YouTube, Zoom, Dropbox and many websites, which makes it ideal for blazing through lecture recordings. Here is a list of the key bindings it implements:
- Up and down arrows increase and decrease the playback rate, respectively
- Left and right arrows move the playhead a set number of seconds
- Right control key increases the playback rate while held down
- Right shift key plays and pauses the video
Even though this extension only solves the first two of the three issues I set out to resolve, it has proven extremely useful for learning concepts quicker. After a bit of self-promo on a Discord server for a programming class, other students even told me they used Lecture Speedup to study more efficiently before exams.
Trying it Out
If all that sounds appealing, you can give Lecture Speedup a go by following the instructions in the README.md on the project's GitHub.
As a quick demo of the extension, below is a video of me blazing through a lecture recording and taking notes on the material covered. Enjoy!