What kind of courses? Are they graphics and productivity apps (e.g. Photoshop, Microsoft Office, etc)? Or are they programming & databases development stack?

What kind of courses? Are they graphics and productivity apps (e.g. Photoshop, Microsoft Office, etc)? Or are they programming & databases development stack? (E.g. PHP, Ruby, Javascript, etc). If the courses are of the first category (product apps), the videos can be very helpful. That type of training is heavily task based. In other words, your eyes follow the instructor's mouse as it moves around the screen and you "look over his shoulder" to learn how to use software. It's much easier to learn Photoshop from dynamic video lessons rather than a static book. However for category of programming, it is more of a mixed bag. You will often get higher density of information and best practices from books and blogs rather than videos. That's not to say there aren't any exceptional programming videos but on balance, the books are higher quality. However, some programming videos are heavily "task based" such as how to navigate around MS Visual Studio, or Eclipse, or setting of Apache web server.