Saturday, September 14, 2013

Lecturers should use YouTube as a teaching aid

Lecturers should use YouTube as a teaching aid

In recent times on line delivery of lessons has become a very popular medium for persons interested in obtaining further qualifications or knowledge – lecturers post notes and resources in a folder where students review, post questions and submit assignments. Throughout my experience, I’ve found the experience to be a really convenient way for knowledge dissemination as there’s no requirement to attend a physical building at a fixed time and there is the ability to really carry on with your life whilst achieving your goals.  

Schools.com quoted a report from a company called Marketdata Enterprises Inc which reported that on line education accounted for 30% of all post-secondary education enrolments with an expectation that it will grow to 37% by 2015. Now with all that being said do you feel that the current approach to online education is sufficient to deliver some technical content? In a typical ‘brick-and-mortar’ class you could go to a tutorial, the library or study groups; for online not so much online.

Have no fear, YouTube is here!  In my opinion the perfect support structure is YouTube, for my most difficult courses as there are well qualified lecturers who provide a different approach to teaching the same topic and probably geared towards your learning style. Universities such as MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Yale and Columbia have been using YouTube for a while now, the site OpenCulture.com provides free cultural & educational media on the web and has created a list of “10 University Collections on YouTube” which showcases some of the institutions I mentioned above and their YouTube channels, check this link out 

For me, I’ve found lectures or presentations that explained clearly to me concepts that I couldn't understand on my own or from reading 60 pages each week for each course. I would recommend that all lecturers provide suitable content via YouTube videos and have them as apart of their teaching arsenal as these videos will explain the concepts and provide students with the opportunity to comment thus giving feedback or asking questions in the context of the lecture.  YouTube proved to be very useful during a CISCO Routing & Protocols through a YouTube channel called VambarInc. This made reading the content so much more pleasurable; just sorry I never thought about this in Psychology class, what was Freud saying anyway, Phallic Mallic!... Ok I got it now… hmmm… just checked YouTube, very enlightening. 


 I’d love to hear what some of you think, do you think intermittent lectures are enough to be successful or do we need teacher directed content on YouTube to ensure our success? +1 Youtube!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm in total agreement with you on this Delton. YouTube provides lots of interesting videos but we have to admit too that a lot of crap is put online as well and such one has to wade through piles of junk before finding the perfect material for classes. Paloris