Heh, thanks for the post which I found entertaining, especially this part: "Videos allow the viewer to sit in a comfy chair and listen to a soft-voiced, nice-sounding instructor (am I the only one that thinks the voice of Salman Khan is incredibly soothing?), which inevitably puts the viewer to sleep." :)
More to the topic I personally feel that more important than the choice of video or interactive exercise as the teaching medium is the individual's motivation to learn. Without that it's easy to fall asleep, metaphorically speaking, and with it, things like pausing, rewinding etc. isn't a problem at all. The training material simply has to open a few conceptual doors, and the rest naturally follows.
Codecademy courses are fairly easy compare to those of Coursera or Udacity. There's a huge difference between giving someone a badge because he has made something trivial and trying to teach this person real CS concepts. For those who really want to learn something Udacity is way better than Codecademy.
That's a fair argument, but surely there is a way to incorporate Codecademy's mechanics into sites that cover more advanced material? I suppose that Udacity's "Programming a Robotic Car" wouldn't have had much luck using this method, but perhaps an introductory algorithms and data structures course could.
More to the topic I personally feel that more important than the choice of video or interactive exercise as the teaching medium is the individual's motivation to learn. Without that it's easy to fall asleep, metaphorically speaking, and with it, things like pausing, rewinding etc. isn't a problem at all. The training material simply has to open a few conceptual doors, and the rest naturally follows.