Ten reasons why I use YouTube for my lectures
With the majority of lectures now being turned online, I thought I’d share some of my reasons why I have opted to use YouTube rather than Panopto or other services. I do this for two reasons. First, to hopefully help others. Second, because I am new to this too and am hoping other, more experienced, lecturers can chip in and offer advice.
1. Ease of use
We are time poor and learning new tools is a pain. It’s the same for students. I want to make my content as accessible as possible. Like it or loathe it, YouTube has cornered the online video sharing market.
2. Centralised storage outside of my work email
I use centralised storage for the same reason I don’t add my institutional email when acting as corresponding author on academic manuscripts. Things change. Although I’m not planning on leaving my current employer anytime soon, I may not be here forever either. Untying the threads between activities that link to me and those that are specific to my work, allows me to plan a little for a future where my work email address is no longer active.
3. Share content with non-students
I came into academia as a mature and first-generation student. I want to be able to share what I can with people from a similar background to mine. Hopefully some will realise that if a numpty from a deprived area can do it, they can too. I am motivated by helping not making money for my employer — although I appreciate they need to keep the lights on and pay our salary.
4. Auto captioning
The auto captioning is good. Really very good compared to what I have seen from other platforms. I want my content to be accessible for those who need captioning, of course, and for that captioning to be really accurate. However, I don’t want to spend my time correcting the captions and I’m not allocated any time to do it. YouTube has one billion hours of watched content each day and near infinite pots of cash to spend on improving their service. Their algorithms are better than most.
5. It looks good
YouTube channels allow for some basic branding and you can make the content look appealing with thumb nails. Keeping 18 year old students interested in your content while online is no mean feat for people like us who have little experience in delivering online courses. I’ve studied the YouTube formula that keeps people switched on and coming back for more. They do it for the revenue, we do it because we want to be effective educators. Unfortunately, no amount of branding will turn some of our content into a YouTube revenue stream though.
6. YouTube studio makes editing simple
Time is becoming a theme in this post and YouTube’s Studio saves time. Although basic, it allows trimming and splitting, which for me, is around 90% of what I want to do. YouTube Studio won’t make your content look professionally made, but by trimming the fat from your videos, you can increase engagement and save your students time.
7. Subscribe button
I want my students to engage in the content — hopefully that’s clear from this post! I could and do put it on a platform that requires them to click ten plus links to check in unprompted, but I know that’s not how many of them work. The subscribe button sends the content as I create it. Again, go with the tide rather than fight it.
8. YouTube Premieres
YouTube has a Premiere Option which allows you to control when content is released. This is useful for when you want to trickle feed content but don’t want uploading videos on your to-do list every week for the next seven months.
9. Live steam
I haven’t tried live-streaming, but given that Twitch and other live-streaming platforms saw a 100% increase in daily users during lockdown, I’m certainly not against giving it a go. In fact, I can see live-streams democratising higher education in the future, but that’s a whole ‘nother can o’ worms. For now, I’m just flagging that you can do this via YouTube and pointing out that it might be really useful to figure out software like the Open Broadcasting System (OBS). You can do all kinds of interesting things like lining up videos, sound effects, live chat, polls and all sorts of other actions. If you stream and can add to this list jump in, goodness knows us lecturers need the help.
10. Account management
Last one, if you set your channel up as a brand account you can collaborate with others to share and manage the content. This is useful if you have more than one tutor on the course. I also like to dream of a fantasy world where we receive some support for this kind of task so we can focus more on research. If by some miracle you manage to persuade your school to employ some kind of digital content officer (I know, I know, stop laughing), they could manage your accounts remotely.
That’s it for now, but please do add your comments and suggestions so we can help improve this for others. Like all YouTubers, I must finish by saying “If you like this content subscribe to my channel”:D https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjYfby1P11Nr4mEg8k_e_kw
