What's wrong with YouTube?

#STEMvideos #digitalvideo #remoteteaching #onlinelearning #youtube

YouTube is a fantastic resource for students, teachers, and creators. Sometimes.

I try to not get stuck in the rabbit hole. If I spend more than ten, fifteen minutes searching, I usually just give up.

"Falling down the YouTube rabbit hole" is an all-too common complaint from educators and learners alike. It's hard not falling prey to the endless pages of resources and links on such a vast ecosystem of videos.

I scoured YouTube for hours and nothing came up.

Many educators feel they lose time when searching for online videos for their students. Others gravitate toward their favorite creators, such as Bozeman Science and Amoeba Sisters, just to avoid the slog of researching and evaluating for hours on end. But this strategy may not be the best for learning outcomes.

Some of the most popular platforms for digital videos in secondary science classrooms do not support the maximum amount of learning for their content areas. Crash Course, a wildly popular channel featuring YouTube stars John and Hank Green, uses colorful imagery, fun anecdotes, and lots of background details. These videos frequently include complex animations with many distracting features, components known to detract from learning.

The main way I find videos is on YouTube and going to different channels... it's a lot to look through. A lot of YouTube just has random people.

Not all videos provide the same educational value. Though popular educational channels on YouTube such as Khan Academy have become household names, many videos illustrate concepts at different levels, speeds, and with varying instructional strategies. Teachers need to select videos that are not just entertaining and engaging but that actually supports learning.

There is no one right way to select a digital video for classroom instruction, but there are many research-supported multimedia practices for using digital video to enhance student learning.

But evaluating videos for these strategies isn't easy.

A simple YouTube search of “cellular respiration,” a popular topic in standard high-school biology courses, yields over 23,100 results. With thousands of readily-available options to choose from, teachers must parse through a large ecosystem of digital content before selecting a video for their students. Videos linked to specific instructional standards and student levels are few and far between. Even when required to use digital videos by their administration or district, many teachers do not have the time or tools to evaluate and select the best digital resource.

To save time, teachers could benefit from an automated scoring system, such as a browser plug-in or evaluation site that scored videos for learning criteria. Teachers also need videos that are curated to their students’ ability levels, and the generation of a resource with specific state or national learning objectives tagged on quality videos would be a valuable time-saving tool for teachers.

Digital videos in the classroom are not going away, and this technology will only add to secondary STEM teachers’ frustration and stress unless better tools are developed to support video evaluation and selection. With more resources produced every day and more teachers searching for appropriate online resources, taking a closer look at the videos entering classrooms and curricula is vital to the future of STEM education.

STEM Video Cafe offers a solution. We provide time-saving, research-backed tools for educators to find their way out of the YouTube rabbit hole. Teachers need more than the YouTube search algorithm in order to find the best videos for their science classrooms.