Audio-Visual courses or theoretical lessons?

What's your preference, ICS supports totally theoretical lessons unlike some of the other chess courses which are entirely audio-visual courses. It's popularly said, one picture (or video) is worth a thousand words. So if ICS supports audio-visual courses it will be much quicker for people to catch.

What is your opinion?

Both, but if I had to choose, theory is way better imo. That's why I am here ;-)

Personally I like to start with a video to get a quick insight of the subject, then I follow with the theory on my board in a deeper way. With this method I get the most out of theory.

All, the good news is that our admin Raul told me that soon he will be adding some AV lessons to increase the popularity and that will be freely accessible to all. That is, the current members don't need to pay anything extra.

I need an interactive learning environment which the ICS theory provides. To learn the openings I repetitively go over the positions, trying to guess the next moves until I've memorized all of the lines and to-do lists. And, the exercises are essential to learning to think and practice.

Now that I have several months learning the comprehensive ICS opening repertoire I find it much more enjoyable following the a/v games and lectures on ICC - it's quite a leap forward for me to be able to follow the openings and recognize most of them and their impact on my own (well ICS's) repertoire. So now I get a lot more out of the videos, but only because of the prior study.

It would be good to add AV lectures to the ICS courseware, definitely. It would make the whole course "rise up".

I did a "webinar" the other day with the Chess Opening Wizard author. Basically he did the instruction and participants could ask questions during the presentation which he followed up with real time demonstrations. Some participants had audio capability, others asked questions via text messages.

Overall, a very effective way to communicate that has potential for interactive teaching in chess, I know I learned a lot during the presentation. Whether it is commercially viable or even feasible with an international audiance is another question....

It's not. Time-zones stuff with that kind of thing all the time. I know. I'm Australian. We always cop the rough end of the stick there ;-)

I don't have very many intelligent questions at 4am.

A webinar isn't good for the reason BorgQueen mentions.

But a video with some examples is always good, that way us people who have not english as their national languege can interper what is explained in the theory a little better then without the video.