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April 24, 2008, 09:41 AM ET
What Happens When a Course Is Taught Entirely via YouTube?
The film Super Size Me demonstrated the downsides of fast food by showing what would happen if someone ate only at McDonald’s for a month. The course “Learning From YouTube” at Pitzer College took the idea of teaching via YouTube to a similar extreme. All class assignments took the form of YouTube videos, most discussion took place in the form of comments posted to YouTube videos, and all class lectures and discussions were filmed and shared with the world for anyone to see and comment on.
Not surprisingly, the professor, Alexandra Juhasz, says the experiment shows that the traditional classroom is a far healthier environment for learning than the quick-bite world of YouTube.
Ms. Juhasz, a professor of media studies at Pitzer, presented her conclusions about the project in a post on the Open Culture blog this week.
She said that the features of the site broke down the power relations of the academic classroom, and as a result, “the nature of teaching and learning shifts (I’d say for the worse).”
The students do end up making some interesting points in their video assignments. One student argued, for instance, that the 500-character limit that YouTube places on user comments has encouraged short, “often inflammatory comments” to be posted, and has made it impossible to post longer and more thoughtful critiques. —Jeffrey R. Young
Categories: Teaching
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