Emerging Technologies Consulting

YouTube Edu launched this week, collecting many of the college and university posted lectures and events.  Many colleges and universities have been recording classroom and special lectures and posting them to YouTube for quite a while, and they have also been using iTunes U for this purpose as well.  I wonder, and I’m not the only one, if YouTube Edu will be an iTunes U killer. But I also noticed that many of the videos are not-so-subtle attempts at marketing the college.  Certainly, that’s one of the appeals of doing something like this.  Prospective students Google your school and some YouTube videos come up, they watch and enjoy, and then apply.  But, there’s a lot of good material there.  I’m teaching Watchmen next week and I found a few videos on the science of Watchmen and the Cold War/War on Terrorism commentary it might offer.  Useful stuff for me as a teacher, and probably for students as well.

All the videos for now, come from partner institutions, a fact some complain about, suggesting that YouTube should include video from other sources that are also educational.  While I agree that maybe the definition is too narrow, I know that the material you get if you click on the “education” tag in YouTube or do a broader search for educational material is all over the map in terms of quality.  The same is true for some of the college material–sometimes it’s boring or doesn’t address the topic you thought it would, but at least it’s somewhat easier to find quality information.  Maybe there’s a way to counter this narrow focus on institutional videos.

Others have pointed out the narrow focus on college and university material, leaving out the K-12 sector.  In my meanderings through YouTube, I’ve run into a lot of interesting material that obviously comes from K-12 institutions.  It would be great to collect that all in one place or to otherwise provide a way for younger students to safely post their video work online.

Academic Earth in another site that hosts video lectures, purporting to be the Hulu for eductation.  It has a very limited number of institutions from which it draws material, but the material is all very good, and it’s pretty easy to find things by browsing through their directory, but there’s definitely less material there.

I like the idea of having some lectures and interviews and general visual material available online.  Certainly I’ve used many of those materials myself, but I worry about the proliferation of just lecture recordings as opposed to more focused material.  It seems that the lecture material is better consumed within a larger context, along with a course or at least a collection of readings. I know some of these videos are part of OCW courses, but that’s not always clear from the stand-alone videos. If these are going to be a way of providing informal learning for people, I think it would be nice to link to other resources, to build more of a learning environment around the videos.  This isn’t happening on YouTube, Academic Earth, or iTunes right now.  You get related videos, based on keywords, but not much else.  These could be much richer resources, and maybe that means not relying on Google/YouTube to do all the contextualizing.

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