First online General class lesson posted to YouTube

I’ve just posted video #2: Resistors, capacitors, and inductors in series and parallel.

I’ve been playing around with developing an online General class for years now. I never was really happy with my efforts, though, and I would eventually abandon the project.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, in the middle of the pandemic quarantine, I decided to give it another go. This time, my idea was to develop Khan Academy-style videos. There are a ton of resources on the net instructing you on how to do them, but what it seems to boil down to is the ability to draw on a Wacom tablet, while explaining the material at the same time.

This is more difficult than you might imagine. First, is the ability to produce something legible. This takes a lot of practice. On top of that, before I could use the Wacom tablet that I purchased years ago, I had to upgrade the driver. That took the better part of the afternoon, since the “official” driver needed a patch to actually work with MacOS 10.15.4.

Second, it took a lot of experimenting with Adobe SketchBook settings and practice drawing to produce decent drawings. I think I got that down now. The nice thing about using SketchBook is that it’s free for the Mac.

One technique that I hit upon is to use the text tools to set up common text, such as headings and equations. Using the text tools makes them very readable, and by putting them on separate layers, I can make them appear and disappear as needed.

So, finally, I think I have something workable. Below, is the first video that I’m mostly happy with. It’s’ short, but I think that separating the topics into short videos is the right thing to do. I know that some of the topics will be longer because there are more questions for those topics.

Let me know what you think.