Open Air

Video sites for education

June 20th, 2008 Posted by: l.dewis

I’ve been doing some work in understanding how we might use video sites like YouTube to distribute learning materials and build awareness about open educational resources. When we started talking about YouTube and how other universities are using it as a platform to open up access/jump on bandwagon we thought about whether this was a useful site for our content. Who uses YouTube? Are people looking for educational content in what is a user generated content space where entertaining viral videos get the most attention?

So take someone looking at a popular video of a visual illusion. They will probably wonder how it works. The producer of the video might not want to tell them because then the viewer won’t watch it 500 times trying to work it out. But say an OU expert in Psychology posts a video answer. YouTube will link up those two videos to keep the viewer engaged on the site. Instead of the viewer needing to search the internet for an explanation (a process which benefits from them having some prior knowledge that the explanation has a relationship with psychology), they stumble across it (what’s the visual equivalent of stumbling? Blinking?). So can we hijack attention-heavy spaces and sneak in our Trojan Horse of Education to build awareness and use of open educational resources? Or should we be riding roughshod into spaces more obviously intended for an audience who are looking for educational content? Or both?

From the standpoint of wanting to open up access to educational materials I see YouTube as a place where…

1) It is easy to collate a number of video resources that represent the world of the OU visually - from low-fi to high-fi, from projects, courses and people, lowering the institutional barriers to communicating ideas through video. A few of our academics are already using YouTube to publish video content for their students because it works for them - it’s flexible and easy.
2) Sharing and conversation around video can take place - not just by our students but by anyone interested in the topics we teach.
3) We can facilitate an informal and bitesized learning experience through creativity and communication.
4) Our materials can benefit more people because we’ve gone to their inter’hood instead of expecting them to find ours.

But YouTube is not the only video site and certainly not the most focussed one for education. Try SciVee - video sharing for scientists, Big Think and TED for an insight into great minds, PublicTV - for politics and “factual media on demand”, Kaltura - for opensource digital storytelling and group projects, TeacherTube and Annenberg Media - for teacher training and knowledge sharing, Green Energy TV - for environmental breakthroughs, Birdcinema - for studying our feathered friends and 5min and sclipo - for skills sharing. And if you are just wanting to view educational videos rather than distribute your own then the number of sites grows to include the National Geographic, Open Video collections, clips from cable channels like the ResearchChannel and archives such as the Moving Image Archive.

(And just as I finish this blog post I receive an email from the folks at YouTube wondering how progress is going on developing our OU YouTube channels. Cue to stop blogging and get back to doing.)

Entry Filed under: Uncategorized