If you ever won­dered whether pro­fes­sion­al sci­en­tists are skep­ti­cal about some of the incred­i­bly fun, attrac­tive and brief online videos that pur­port to explain sci­en­tif­ic prin­ci­ples in a few min­utes, you’d be right.

Derek Muller com­plet­ed his doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion by research­ing the ques­tion of what makes for effec­tive mul­ti­me­dia to teach physics. Muller curates the sci­ence blog Ver­i­ta­si­um and received his Ph.D. from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Syd­ney in 2008.

It’s no small irony that Muller’s argu­ment, that online instruc­tion­al videos don’t work, has reached its biggest audi­ence in the form of an online video. He launch­es right in, lec­ture style, with a gen­tle attack on the Khan Acad­e­my, which has famous­ly flood­ed the Inter­net with free instruc­tion­al videos on every sub­ject from arith­metic to finance.

While prais­ing the academy’s founder, Salman Khan, for his teach­ing and speak­ing tal­ent, Muller con­tends that stu­dents actu­al­ly don’t learn any­thing from sci­ence videos in gen­er­al.

In exper­i­ments, he asked sub­jects to describe the force act­ing upon a ball when a jug­gler toss­es it into the air. Then he showed them a short video that explained grav­i­ta­tion­al force.

In tests tak­en after watch­ing the video, sub­jects pro­vid­ed essen­tial­ly the same descrip­tion as before. Sub­jects said they didn’t pay atten­tion to the video because they thought they already knew the answer. If any­thing, the video only made them more con­fi­dent about their own ideas.

Sci­ence instruc­tion­al videos, Muller argues, shouldn’t just explain cor­rect infor­ma­tion, but should tack­le mis­con­cep­tions as well. He prac­tices this approach in his own work, like this film about weight­less­ness in the space sta­tion. Hav­ing to work hard­er to think through why an idea is wrong, he says, is just as impor­tant as being told what’s right.

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based free­lance writer. See more of her work at .