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YouTube as an educational tool
Online videos are used increasingly and more and more effectively by both faculty and scholars, inside and outside of the classroom, to engross students in their learning, invigorate classroom discussion, and achieve course learning goals such as encouraging students to be well prepared for class sessions and getting them engaged in classroom activities (Fink 2003; Myers and Jones 1993). Well-developed working and learning assignments and activities can be essential in meeting these results and in designing an active learning surrounding. These same concerns apply when taking into account the many Web 2.0 tools that are now available, especially one particularly famous video-sharing website – YouTube.
YouTube was created in 2005 and now has over 70 million videos uploaded, 80% of which are amateur, 15% professional, and 5% commercial. According to a survey held by Joan-Francesc Fondevila-Gascón, Pedro Mir-Bernal, Javier L. Crespo, Marta Carreras-Alcalde, and LluÃs Feliu-Roé and published by Observatorio (OBS) Journal, (2017), YouTube is one of the most popular platforms that students use in relation with learning and university-related work. ‘However, less than half of today’s college students (44%) believe that ‘most’ or ‘almost all’ of their instructors use Instructional Technology effectively in courses (Caruso and Salaway 2008). The challenge is for the faculty to catch up.’ That being said, the question raises whether lecturers and universities ought to adopt these new tools in their everyday teaching methods to both better interact with students and offer modern teaching ways.
‘The Internet provides incomparable opportunities for online participation, collaboration, communication, and user-based content development. It includes an even larger variety of material that can be easily captured and posted – for example, company presentations, product demonstrations, and webcasts; personal videos such as travel clips; and music, movies, or TV, including news clips, and so on.’ And since young people spend a lot of time on YouTube anyway, they will not even need to let go of their phones or their computers, they can just type in the topic that concerns them, and a ton of videos will pop up, including TEDx presentations, book reviews, study materials, films and so on. Some may argue that like anywhere on Google (although Google is a research engine that would include YouTube materials too), YouTube is filled with false information and fake news. But the more videos people watch the more they will be able to distinguish what is true and what is not, just like when reading. You start by watching many of them before you can finally select the one including the content you need. And you repeat that over and over again until you develop a skill to sort out which information, in our case which video, is trustworthy. Later, you can apply this skill when searching for another type of data, on another platform. Otherwise, without getting used to swiftly evaluating texts, searching for suitable content be an extremely time-consuming and confusing process, usually ending with you becoming frustrated and finally just picking whatever comes first just to get your assignment done. But with the experience of going through dozens of videos, articles, or journals, there appears to be a subconscious pattern – in other words, intuition, that gets you through all the useless and brings you to the important. Still, we need to have a rational understanding of what is trustworthy and what is not, and why. YouTube enhances that practice, which is useful in many aspects throughout higher education since many of the written assignments include researching and evaluating sources and information. Even if you are concerned about struggling to find the right video, one way to make this process more process easier to carry out is through video uploading and sharing at platforms specifically designed for schooling such as TeacherTube which is a video-sharing site, like YouTube, explicitly geared for education purposes. Teachers can post instructions and share lessons there. But even this type of managing the research procedure will soon not be needed as more and more universities form partnerships with YouTube by creating their channels, listed under YouTube EDU (http://www.youtube.com/edu), where they post videos of lectures. ‘In one year alone, YouTube EDU partnered with over 300 universities and other providers to offer more than 65,000 free lectures, news items, and snippets of campus life.’ Such channels at this moment provide users with costless access to over 200 complete courses from over a hundred universities. Users can subscribe to channels, make a playlist with their favorite channels and videos, post their content, and leave comments about others’ content, creating an interconnected group of like-minded users.
Many YouTubers influence people to find what is most interesting to them to study and provide them with information about personal experience and not only the scientific explanation of a problem and what is happening but also how they achieved success and how they developed their careers. In a world where the content is constantly changing the nature of the YouTube environment presents an outstanding opportunity for students to gain access to the most up-to-date material and current examples, whether to eke out classroom discussion or to emphasize new developments in the field, and the content is often current, absorbing, and creatively presented. Thus, even if you have no other sources of relevant information about what concerns you, especially if it is a peculiar interest from euthanasia to blacksmiths and conspiracy theories, you have the opportunity to learn something new about it from people who have had a point of contact with such issues.
What is more, since the material is Web-based, students and faculty can without difficulty pass it out to each other. Many YouTube channels have been developed where people with similar interests collect and share relevant content. Thus, in some cases, YouTubers even inspire others to become YouTubers themselves. And although the majority of them first start by creating their channel just because of an interest, to which they wanted to give a shot, some of them, lucky and hardworking enough, actually become famous, and even write a book when feeling they have gone through so much that they think it might be worth sharing their story on paper. More often than not, these stories include quitting college or university, but also a priceless experience with coping with people both in real life and on the internet, putting as much effort as they can in every new project, and, most importantly, with being happy with what they do for a living.
In addition, people who make videos know that the audience that watches varies significantly. So they elaborate on everything thoroughly and make it as simple as possible. Thus the viewer understands the basic idea and can develop their knowledge step by step. If you have missed or failed to understand a fundamental term in class, on which a great amount of the material depends, but you are too introverted to raise your hand and ask the professor to repeat it, your second best option is to unlock your phone, open the YouTube app and type in whatever is unclear to you. And you can be sure that, along with the more sophisticated ones, there will always be some videos with information on level ‘beginner’.
YouTube can also help you learn a language. Imagine you are into make-up but you need to study for your German class. The solution – watch make-up tutorials in German. You will be attentively listening to the person talking and thus, without even realizing it, memorizing words and phrases. Someone may suggest that you watch a German television. But then you take the risk of being occupied browsing through the channels until you find something that catches your attention and makes you not only stick to it but also be so attracted and amused that you suddenly forget that you came to study in the first place. And we all know that studying without even knowing that you are doing so is the best kind of studying. Of course, you will need the basic knowledge that you get from classes and real-life practice. But when you arrive at that specific point when you still have some vocabulary to memorize but writing it down over and over again just appears to not be working for you anymore, something that has a much stronger influence on the mind is required. Something that would pierce through the membrane of your brain, find shelter there, and stay for a long time, unlike the mechanical rewriting of a word that only makes it circle your brain, and then fly away whenever an external factor distracts you. And that something, which is needed, is pure interest, in our case for make-up, combined with the excitement that the unknown vocabulary causes in our minds.
Making use of SNS applications such as YouTube resembles having a personal tutor. You can set the speed with which you are learning, you can mix it with your interests so you find it more entertaining, time and place are no obstacles, and it is costless. For tons of people around the world, YouTube and a vast majority of other video-sharing platforms are transforming into a new educational model with a growing number of free-lance channels like the ‘Khan Academy’ providing free access to an immense amount of content on almost any subject you might stumble upon. This is all beneficial for people in developing and developed countries who strive for education but could have not afforded it or even obtained access. A wide variety of educational systems are consolidating free video platforms such as YouTube into their academic environment. Discussions are produced either by content creators or by the professors/lecturers themselves, working with a webcam and some simple software, and uploading them to YouTube. The link to the media file is then included in the course website where faculty and students can watch it on demand. Along with other advances of the 21st century, we are witnessing how the old campus-based way of education, which has been around for a thousand years, is being overthrown by a new model, open for anyone, anywhere, anytime. Of course, curious students being gathered and mentored by a well-informed and experienced teacher will always be an irreplaceable option. Those who want to stick to the traditional practice will still have the alternative to get it at a conventional university. But colleges also need to take into account the increasing number of students who might lack certain abilities to attend class in person, whether they want to or not. For them, online classes with high-quality video-on-demand are essential.
References
- Fondevila-Gascón, Joan-Francesc, et al./ ‘Use Of Social Networking Sites And Instant Messaging Applications For University-Related Work And Studying’/ Observatorio (OBS*) Journal, (2017), 017-024
- Sherer, Pamela, and Shea, Timothy/’Using Online Video to Support Student Learning and Engagement’/COLLEGE TEACHIng, 2011, Copyright ©Taylor&FrancisGroup
- Apostolova, Marika/ ‘SEEU USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA: TEACHING AND LEARNING THROUGH SHARING KNOWLEDGE’/ SEEU REVIEW special edition/ Volume 9, Number 2, 2013
- Lynch, Matthew/ ‘YouTube a valuable educational tool, not just cat videos’/ The Tech Advocate/06.29.2016
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