YouTube’s Slow Drift Toward Enlightenment

Today, the Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion has a good arti­cle on an emerg­ing trend — uni­ver­si­ties bring­ing their lec­tures to YouTube. As you’ll see, we get a men­tion in the arti­cle.

We first began dis­cussing this trend about a year ago. In this pub­lic radio inter­view aired last March, we talked about the sheer dearth of intel­li­gent video on YouTube and sug­gest­ed sev­er­al steps for rais­ing the bar. Close to a year lat­er, things don’t look much bet­ter. Yes, we’ve recent­ly found 10 Signs of Intel­li­gent Life at YouTube. And we’ve even man­aged to assem­ble a “playlist” of intel­li­gent videos. But, regard­less, intel­li­gent video remains in very short sup­ply at the Google-owned video ser­vice. And the smart video that does exist is remark­ably hard to find, even though, rather iron­i­cal­ly, Google’s mis­sion is “to orga­nize the world’s infor­ma­tion and make it uni­ver­sal­ly acces­si­ble and use­ful.”

This all stands in stark con­trast to what we’ve seen at Apple. On its own path to dom­i­nance, Apple has some­how carved out a space for high-qual­i­ty cul­tur­al con­tent. Even though ITunes is already a breed­ing ground for smart media, Apple launched iTune­sU over the past year, pro­vid­ing a plat­form for uni­ver­si­ties to deliv­er free lec­tures and cours­es to the larg­er world. (See our Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­cast Col­lec­tion and our col­lec­tion of Free Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es.) We prob­a­bly need to keep in mind that YouTube does­n’t have the same finan­cial moti­va­tions as Apple to accom­mo­date the intel­lec­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty. (Remem­ber, Apple made it through the dark years by sell­ing Macs to uni­ver­si­ties and col­leges.) But, even so, GooTube could smarten its offer­ing by tak­ing just a few small steps. How about mak­ing the so-called “Edu­ca­tion Sec­tion” include actu­al edu­ca­tion­al con­tent? How about let­ting seri­ous providers of cul­tur­al con­tent go beyond the 10 minute video lim­it? (Sound bites are inher­ent­ly lim­it­ing.) And how about fig­ur­ing out ways to give qual­i­ty scores to videos and help sep­a­rate the wheat from the chaff? Google fig­ured out how to make qual­i­ty dri­ve the way it orga­nizes the web. Sure­ly, it would­n’t be hard for Google’s big aqcui­si­tion to use sim­i­lar algo­rithms to orga­nize the video world.

In the end, it’s per­haps a mat­ter of time. Per­haps we need to sit back and wait for Google to put its stamp on YouTube. The merg­er is still fair­ly recent. And, his­tor­i­cal­ly, Google has­n’t been afraid to work with infor­ma­tion that has niche appeal. Nor has it run away from orga­niz­ing infor­ma­tion that can be dif­fi­cult to mon­e­tize. Per­haps bet­ter things will unfold in ’08, but, based on what I’m see­ing, I’m not entire­ly opti­mistic.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See our col­lec­tion of Busi­ness School Pod­casts, Law School Pod­casts, and Com­plete Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es.

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Comments (2)
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  • Hi Dan
    I’ve been tin­ker­ing with var­i­ous ways of mak­ing Open­Learn con­tent from the Open Uni­ver­si­ty avail­able in a portable way ( http://feedlearning.com ) and I’ve also had a go at the UC Berke­ley youtube video lec­tures.

    In par­tic­u­lar, here’s a way of brows­ing the UCB youtube playlist­ed cours­ers, as a well as search­ing and view­ing all their youtube video lec­tures:
    http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/012375.html

    tony

  • Gator says:

    Cul­len’s Abc’s over the past year has cre­at­ed over 300 ear­ly child­hood edu­ca­tion videos, and edu­ca­tion­al idea videos for adults that work with chil­dren. Just until recent­ly there was no edu­ca­tion cat­e­go­ry even on YouTube, so we are so hap­py that there is one now. Cur­rent­ly, we have over 780,000 total video views and get from 5k to 6k+ views a day. Com­ments come dai­ly from all over the glob­al. Online video is so pow­er­ful and acces­si­ble. We feel like we are among the pio­neers of edu­ca­tors using online video pro­duc­tive­ly and sup­port­ing child devel­op­ment.
    Here is our web­site:
    http://www.cullensabcs.com/
    All of the videos are post­ed our YouTube chan­nel:
    http://youtube.com/profile?user=Cullensabcs

    Thanks for you blog!

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