YouTube to Replace Textbooks (6th Post)

 YouTube to Replace Textbooks (6th Post)



Thanks for all the great feedback on my blog spot in the past couple of weeks.  The comments you provide are truly educational for me as I look to expand everyone’s knowledge on the global YouTube platform.  With the increased digital age, I feel like these discussions are vital in the way instructional designers look at the design, development, and implementation of instruction in the future. 

     I agree that one of the most important factors to ensure when it comes to YouTube is its credibility.  I really like how one of our bloggers related YouTube to Wikipedia.  It is imperative that the content included within your instructional design or content used by teachers has the credibility necessary.  This credibility provides the necessary validity to the instruction.  Overall, I am not sure that we are too the point to mandate it within lesson plans.  I think instructional designers and educators should be provided education on how to properly nest it in lesson plans.  It should be highly recommended but not so far as to mandate it.  We still need to provide some freedom to allow the designer or educator the flexibility to best suit their audiences needs.  As another blogger pointed out “YouTube Academics” is an excellent idea on how to provide a qualitative source for designers and educators to leverage for validity of the content.  We have all agreed that YouTube is extremely valuable within the classroom but moving forward it should be a tool available to the designer or educator.  As another blogger pointed out embedding the videos to help focus the students is a great technique to facilitate.  With the ability to first validate the credibility and embed the video within the content can lead to stronger arguments for mandatory incorporation for designers and educators.  Unfortunately, we are just not there yet. 

     The digital age and YouTube are here to stay.  This leads me into my next couple of questions and our discussion in the next two weeks.  Many school systems are looking to cut cost when it comes to education.  YouTube is a cheap and easy method of providing education.  Do you think the school systems could benefit (from a cost perspective) of replacing some textbooks with YouTube content?  This of course would include as we previously discussed, a validated and credible video to supplement.   What do you think the pros and cons to this from a school’s cost perspective would be?  Do you think replacing textbooks with YouTube content can reach the same learning objective?  Why or Why not?  Thanks again for all the responses and I look forward to our continued dialogue.


Comments

  1. Kevin,
    Credibility will become a huge part of the success youtube has in the education arena. However I don't think it will be that hard. When the internet first started out people could post anything they wanted in any domain and it would be taken in as fact. There where studies that showed people initially believed almost everything published online because they assumed it was vetted. Over time we learned that was not the case. So, Universities and other scholarly agencies started collecting and creating databases of what they considered to be factual material. They also published technics to determine is something could be considered a reliable source. Youtube I believe will go down this same road. It will start to push video's to a separate section. Videos that have been vetted and considered to contain accurate information. It might even let users who post regularly go through a process to prove they are an expert in something and that their video's can be trusted. I look forward to whatever they come up with though. Not having to scan through to find something credible would be an awesome feature.

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  2. Kevin,

    I think that youtube could expand in education even more than it has already. Many institutions use youtube education, the only problem currently is the content is always being updated. This makes it very hard to maintain the lessons updated with the best videos, and some of the urls change then the inks in the lessons.

    I do see a lot of value in youtube for education since it is used in every other aspect to teach people how to do things such as fixing equipment or putting thing together. This is extremely valuable. Instructional designers will have to find ways to take advantage of youtube fruther. Great blog this week!

    Walt

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  3. Kevin,

    The big problem in my opinion utilizing YouTube to reduce cost in education is censorship. I bring this up from a second amendment perspective. YouTube belongs to Google and every second amendment channel is censored. This gives me the opinion that Google does not believe in the second amendment. Second amendment channels used to receive payment for the amount of views, shares, likes...etc. Second amendment channels have to go another route to be funded (Patreon). These channels utilize (well most of them) use information from media outlets, 2A pro groups and law enforcement. If YouTube is censoring this platform then they are already showing bias against one constitutional right. Like I said...my opinion. YouTube is a great resource for DIY of your home, car and how to use technology but I would leery of its use for education. There are already other organizations and platforms attempting to mislead or blatantly lie of our nations history on YouTube and they are not being censored.
    v/r
    Andy E.

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  4. Kevin,
    Thank you for another thought provoking post. As I sat reflecting I drew the same conclusions as others, veracity of information is essential to the use of information in the classroom. That being said, I also thought that teachers can make and share their own content since YouTube videos are not difficult to create. Also, I loved the idea of YouTube Academics, which I believe would be like Google Scholar. A fantastic idea. Finally, I considered that veracity of information may not always be required in using videos to gain attention or to provoke thought depending on the topic, especially when dealing with the abstract. We know truth and fact may not be the same and we know many topics have opposing points of view. The point of the video may just be to provoke thought and stimulate conversation.
    Mike W.

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  5. Kevin,
    You bring up a great question in this blog as we look to cut costs where we can for our clients, as any good instructional designer would do. As I reflect on your question, my natural instinct is to say yes I think that educational institutions could benefit from replacing textbooks with YouTube content. Institutions are already looking to technology to determine how they can best leverage varying technologies to cut costs and help learners better meet their learning objectives and goals. One benefit can be that a YouTube video can help narrow the focus of textbook content to meet the learning objectives outlined in the syllabus. Too often textbooks contain a lot of material that is not relevant to the learning objectives to an individual course but it was the closest textbook to the curriculum that was vetted during the textbook review process. Plus, a YouTube video could be developed much more efficiently than a textbook. Much like a course rewrite in the military it is a long review process for a textbook to make it to the school system and, as previously stated, it either does not fully meet the learning objectives or it is outdated. The only con I really see is making sure credibility and bias are avoided to the extent possible. Many of my colleagues have addressed this in their comments above but its an important con to highlight again and I think viable solutions have been offered as well such as Mike's suggestion to push videos that have already been deemed credible through peer review to an entirely different section. Great thought provoking discussion. I look forward to your next post.
    Anthony

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