Ain't got no education

One of my favorite young adult novel authors, John Green, makes youtube videos with his brother Hank Green, in a channel called CrashCourse.  John Green's videos are about world history and Hank Green's are on biology (he has degrees in biochemistry and environmental studies). I just watched one on DNA structure and replication because I think I get nostalgic for intro level science. And/or probably would forget what the basics are if I didn't constantly refresh it. 

When I google things for classes that lead to videos, the videos are followed by comments along the lines of "man thanks for doing this, that was so much easier to follow than my professor!" For the good ones I mean, not the ones with 386 dislikes and 5 likes, made by a drunk college student with a Sharpie of knowledge. I feel like in classes/textbooks/most traditional sources of knowledge, you unwittingly enter into a contract that on the part of the professor goes: "thou shalt not disseminate this knowledge in an easy, digestible, interesting manner." It's understandably difficult to teach introductory material to a large number of generally disinterested students who are mostly there against their will but I still get the nagging feeling that a lot of what we're taught is taught in a specifically esoteric way. 

Why can a thirteen minute youtube clip cover the same main points as one chapter, two lectures worth of material in a traditional classroom style? What is the most succinct way to teach something without turning it into simply spitting out facts? The way I see it, knowledge acquisition consists of pretty much two parts: 

Semantic information + the glue, the connections, that make such information meaningful

If all you have is the semantic information, you just have a bunch of facts floating around in your head. I'm saying that because I guess that could be one criticism of non-traditional methods of teaching, like online videos. But while I was watching that DNA one, it covered everything that I remembered or gleaned from the analogous unit in AP Bio. I don't know if that's because my memory's bad, I didn't get enough glue in between the concepts, or if maybe a lot of what ends up being useful information can be distilled into just that much. 

This Don't Teach In An Accessible Way contract continues beyond introductory material. Have you ever read a scientific paper? It's like reading Charles Dickens/Jane Austen--a page long paragraph to tell you that yes, she thought the soup was cold. People are impressed by lengthy scientific sounding sentences and while that isn't the only motivation for writing like that, I wonder if it's at least a portion.

I got off topic. I meant to write, since these new non-traditional ways of teaching seem to be quite effective, to what extend should they replace or be used with the traditional ways. What if your professor is terrible but you can watch Yale's Open Courses and learn physics that way? Does a virtual school that allows you to select teachers based on how good they are, wherever they are, have merit over one where you're forced to get whatever arbitrary professor you get? Or is there still something about being in a physical classroom that trumps however good a virtual teacher is.

Actually this is all pointless wonderings because this website exists: http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2010/02/100-incredible-lectures-from-the-worlds-top-scholars/