[adz_6891]

I wonder whether the point is more to do with memory. If you can show a person remembers more from watching an instructor code out an example on screen compared to reading a text based tutorial, and they spend the same time doing both, then it may follow that it's more efficient for that individual to learn in a non-text based manner.

In practice, I wonder whether this non-text based learning is more useful in the earlier stages of learning to write code. This might because your learning much more than how to write a valid set of lines that compile to an expected result, there's a lot about style, motivation and norms that you have to soak up too. A lot of that is often implicit in text based tutorials, whereas the video based format makes many minor details explicit (e.g. seeing someone type a line of code wrong, and then explain, 'oh yeah this is a commmon mistake'... this actually encodes a lot of information a text based tutorial would typically miss)

[yabadabadoes]

I have to agree, for example, there are many things about programming and getting a non-academic job that I have learned from watching programming videos and many things at a higher academic level or for contributing to a codebase that I have learned from skills picked up from texts and working with text based documentation. The problem I see with the a focus on learning styles for individuals is that they add additional layers of complexity and ultimately more ethical failures by claiming with little or no proof that different learners have vastly different capabilities in a whole bunch of categories that are innate rather than a matter of practice.

Given that subjects have inherent styles of medium that become more essential as you approach expert and need to interact with experts in an efficient way, if you convince someone they have an innate problem you deprive them of the motivation to become an expert, and you see more and more people going to a junior level and dropping out.