YouTube EDU
Posted by michael_horn | Under Educational technology, Higher Education, Non-consumption, Online learning Wednesday Apr 8, 2009Days ago YouTube launched a new “channel” or sub-site—YouTube EDU. The site gathers thousands of free lectures from over a hundred universities across the country and offers them online for free. The site doesn’t just have scattered videos—it has hundreds of full courses, too.
As some have been quick to point out, this isn’t “as good” as actually paying thousands of dollars a year to go the universities so you can get interaction with the professors, have a human touch, ask questions and so forth. You also can’t get a certified degree through YouTube EDU.
But as many others have pointed out, you often cannot get that personal touch in many large lecture classes anyway, and what’s more, many people can’t pay the high tuition rates at these universities or gain admission to them. YouTube offers it all online for free—thereby bringing the opportunity to learn from the leading academics to anyone at any time nearly anywhere. It looks like disruption at its finest—and if someone like the University of the People, which is opening in just days, wraps this in a new business model and offers certification and a degree or perhaps a service like StraighterLine offers access to human beings to answer questions, who knows where this all could go and how it might improve over time to meet these initial shortcomings.
There are other players out here playing in this game as well, such as Academic Earth, which offers better navigation features to find the lecture in which you’re interested and so forth, but reportedly has fewer videos up at the moment.
Who knows how it will evolve, but here’s a guess that the disruption will improve in a myriad of unforeseen ways and will come to benefit the lives of many more people who couldn’t access the original expensive and inconvenient offering.
What welcome news this is for students and families around the world who have had little educational choice in the past — except that provided by state monopolies.
Given that we are entering into the Web 2.0 (the “read-write” web) era, Google has an opportunity to go further in upsetting status quo. It can do so by launching, in tandem with YouTubeEDU, contests and small prizes for students to enrich the core material.
Opportunities for improvement include creating and sharing translations, mini-case studies, transcriptions, and slides to accompany the courses. Winners of such contests can be chosen through a combination of peer voting, such as has been done by 500,000+ musicians at garageband.com, and expert review to ensure accuracy of the proposed enhancements.
Precedents exist for engaging students from poor communities in creation of eLearning resources. At http://www.openworld.com and http://www.entrepreneurialschools.com, sample YouTube clips and online work-study research projects show what students in extremely impoverished, war-torn areas of the world can do in response to small ($30) microscholarships, vouchers, and prizes.
Billons of camera phones capable of recording and sharing short video clips are heading to impoverished areas of the world in the next few years.
If YouTubeEDU opts to encourage co-creation opportunities for students, a wealth of new eLearning resources may generated by media-capable students who are now shortchanged by 19th century-style schools.
This may create an grassroots opportunity for new, market-sensitive learning ventures to flourish.
Mark Frazier
Openworld, Inc.
“Awakening Assets for Good”
http://www.openworld.com and http://www.entrepreneurialschools.com
I and my team have been passionately exploring a disruptive way to ignite children’s imagination through a combination of visual and text within really fun video games. Three years was spent collaborating with renown learning scientists led by Dr. John Bransford. The other members of the team included guys that have shipped several well known AAA video games.
I am thrilled to let you know we recently shipped our first game - ItzaBitza - which many have told us is disruptive in its approach to getting kids to have a lifelong love of reading - arguably the most critical 21st century skill and sadly, one that many children struggle and fail with.
I’d love to hear what you think of ItzaBitza.
best,
Margaret, CEO
Sabi, Inc.
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