Alfie Days is one of my son's friends, lives in the next street, and his Pointlessblog has nearly half a million YouTube subscribers, and at 19 earns a lot more than his parents. This is the power of YouTube.
I'm not in that league but often start lectures and talks with the statement that the lecture or talk is a waste of time if it's not recorded and put up on YouTube, as many more people will watch online than offline. This is an obvious pedagogic benefit - you reach more learners. But its a lesson that's lost on most traditional educators, who largely deliver once-only, sheep-dip experiences. You're restricted to numbers in the hundreds or a thousand or two at conferences but online, the sky's the limit.
I'm not in that league but often start lectures and talks with the statement that the lecture or talk is a waste of time if it's not recorded and put up on YouTube, as many more people will watch online than offline. This is an obvious pedagogic benefit - you reach more learners. But its a lesson that's lost on most traditional educators, who largely deliver once-only, sheep-dip experiences. You're restricted to numbers in the hundreds or a thousand or two at conferences but online, the sky's the limit.
Learning platform
YouTube is
the new television, the largest audio-visual channel in history and the second
largest search engine, after Google. Over a thousand people earn over $100,000
from YouTube advertising on their channels and over a million earn other sums.
It has uncovered new ways of watching, patterns of attention and new ways of
interacting with an audience. In short, it is a new learning platform that
breaks many of the old rules around learning.
Unlike
education, the web has a habit of producing pedagogic models that have massive
user adoption. Short, instructive video is one such Massive Open Online
Pedagogy (MOOP). YouTube showed that short, video clips have a serious
contribution to play in learning. YouTube EDU put lectures online but if anything this was the old world porting its old bad practices into the new world. A bad one hour lecture isn't made better by putting it on YouTube and believe me, YouTube EDU is jammed with bad lectures. It’s TED,
Khan, Thrun and the millions of other short instructional videos that have
irreversibly changed the learning landscape. These are innovators who understand the use of video in learning and have adapted it to their audience's needs. Education will not be televised,
it will be digitised.
Hurley and Chen
Chad Hurley
and Steven Chen are the founders of YouTube, one of the most successful and
remarkable websites ever created. Hurley studied Fine Art; Chen Science and
Maths. They met when they both worked at PayPal and three years later founded
YouTube in 2005. It was sold to Google for £1.65 billion in 2006. Youtube’s word
of mouth and word of mouse recommendations, starting with Saturday Night Live’s
Lazy Sunday clip, led to immediate exponential growth.
How it works
Anyone can
upload and share their clips (up to 10 minutes) for free. You can upload in a
whole range of video formats which are then converted to Flash Video (.flv) for
presentation on the YouTube site, a format that is widely compatible. The video
clips also have some HTML that allows them to be linked to from blogs and other
sites, with an autoplay feature. This is especially useful in social media
where both feed off each other.
Education and training
Although set
up to share entertainment, often funny and surreal, it now has thousands of
education and training clips. Its mass appeal has allowed it to build and
support a service that has a strong brand and a robust infrastructure. It has
grown as a bottom-up repository and now contains a huge wealth of useful
content in subjects as diverse as language learning, science, medicine,
mechanics, plumbing and so on. You name it, YouTube will show you how to do it.
Its pedagogic
power comes from the sheer size of the repository and range of content. Like
Wikipedia it is growing exponentially and as more serious content appears,
teachers, trainers, lecturers and learners can use this content as a free
resource.
KISS (Keep It Short Stupid)
YouTube has
certainly influenced the way video appears and is shown on the web. Most of the
clips have the pedagogic advantage of being short, avoiding overlong,
instructional content and therefore cognitive overload. It has put paid to the
half hour and one hour programme, driven by broadcast TV, which was only that
length as it had to fit timetabled schedules. How long should an instructional
video be? Only as long as it needs to be and no longer i.e. short.
Quality and learning
A second
change is that many of these short clips are often low on production values
(less of an issue now as even low cost cameras produce high quality images.
This confirms the research by Nass and Reeves at Stanford, who showed that the
quality of video is not an important factor in learning and retention. This is
because our visual system has evolved to cope with low quality images such as
poor light conditions and so on. Note that the quality of audio does have a strong
effect on learning and retention. You can’t get away with tinny or variable
volume in your audio.
New pedagogic approaches in video
Creatively, YouTube
has spawned lots of new genres of video instruction:
Khan blackboard and coloured chalk – simple but effective as the learner’s
mind is not cluttered with seeing Khan – it’s the semantic content that
matters, not talking heads.
Thrun’s hand and whiteboard – again it’s not Thrun’s head that matters but seeing
worked problems and solutions.
RSA animations
– clever animations that end up as a single infographic.
TED talks – shows
how lectures should be – passionate experts, no notes, no reading, little
PowerPoint and short.
Software demos
– just show me the steps one by one.
Physical demos
– point the camera at the engine, radiator or whatever I need to fix and show
me how to do it, with commentary. I just take my tablet to the place I need it.
Sports coaching – wayward tennis serve? Watch an
expert coach you in slow motion.
If you van
video it, it’s somewhere on YouTube.
Learning by doing
Learning by
doing has always suffered in the unreal world of the classroom and school. An
important advance has been made through YouTube in vocational and practical learning,
where real tasks are shown on video. These often involve the manipulation of
real objects and the demonstration of processes, all of which can be seen full
screen, increasingly on portable tablets and mobile devices. The pedagogy of learning
by doing can be brought into the learning environment via YouTube.
Video and motor skills
Even sports
and other motor skills can benefit from coaching on YouTube. Musical education
has been revolutionised by the demonstration of fingers on chords and other
techniques. Sports coaching in almost every imaginable sport is commonplace
TED talks
Easily denigrated,
the talking head is still popular on YouTube. The video blog, expert talk and
many other examples of someone giving their all, is still there. TED is perhaps
the most interesting example, a respected brand that focuses on the expert speaker
to deliver punchy sessions that eschew traditional lecturing for short,
passionate and informative talks. TED gives strict instructions to their
speakers and understands that video and lectures are not
about the transfer of knowledge but the passion of the expert and a vision.
What you don’t
see much of on YouTube is drama. It’s not that drama can’t be used for teaching
and learning, just that it’s expensive and difficult to produce. Corporate
training videos used to be full of TV presenter-led instructional videos and
drama (I know I used to make them). This has died a death and often seems
rather wooden and indulgent.
Context missing
Beyond ‘channels’
what YouTube doesn’t give you is context or structure. People like Roger Schank
recommend indexing videos and using learner-led questions to find video
answers, especially from a bank of experts. Khan has software that
contextualises maths in terms of pre-requisites and so on. In other words,
video often needs to be used in a blended context if the learning experience is
to have breadth and depth. Nevertheless, there’s still a massive role for the
one-off video that solves one query or practical problem.
Conclusion
YouTube has
the advantage of being a powerful global brand. The fact that video cameras
have become cheap, even embedded in phones, has meant the massive creation of
content, as well as watching. It is shaping the way video is created,
distributed and watched on the web. It has the potential to act as a vast
education and training resource of free content, lowering costs for learning.
More than this, it has introduced pedagogic changes around the use of video;
its length, quality, format and breadth of uses. As a pedagogic approach it is
clearly useful in both formal and informal learning, an enduring Massive Open
Online Pedagogy (MOOP).
No comments:
Post a Comment