April 24, 2008
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
Posted on Thursday April 24, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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Ah yes, let’s ban YouTube, Wikipedia, and that Google thing. That should get Higher Ed back to where it was before the pesky Internet came along.
— Jeff McNeill Apr 24, 05:10 PM #
On the face of it, this project reminds me of the saccharine studies of the 70’s-80’s. Too much of anything can be problematic. Like Spurlock’s film about the fast food industry, I suspect there are some presumptions and assumptions accompanying the premise (Hopefully though not Spurlock’s deceptions). Something about straw men also comes to mind, I’m afraid.
The real question is not whether a class should be taught using only YouTube, but whether Internet video (via You Tube or other resources) is a valuable learning resource.
That’s a much lower bar than the one Professor Juhasz set up for YouTube.
— Clint Brooks Apr 24, 05:29 PM #
After reading the linked post, it strikes me a bit more thoughtful than this article gives it at face value, but there are still some problems.
Juhasz writes about YouTube maintaining distinctions about who “owns culture.” Aside from disagreeing with this limited view (as YouTube users regularly subvert the corporate images they obtain and manipulate, and as many of the ‘talking heads’ vlogs posts achieve amazing noteriety – even the fakes like LonelyGirl15), the irony of an educational professional making such an observation while simultaneously denigrating YouTube (and by implication other popular Web 2.0 outlets) is rather amazing. There is a difference between the professional and the amateur, but YouTube no more confirms the hold of corporate culture than Prof. Juhasz’s post confirms the grip of professional educators on learning paradigms. Indeed, the grip that places emphasis on “critical theory, avant-garde forms, and radical politics” is slipping.
I also found the quote, “it is difficult to learn in an environment where vying opinions rule” to be a strange one, considering that there is much in academia, including issues that confront intro-level students, that is unsettled. Juhasz, perhaps unintentionally, seems to be making a plea for the kind of instructor-centered hold on academia that the new media (in forms more sophisticated and cultured than YouTube) is steadily challenging.
I certainly agree that much of the public is challenged as far as media literacy goes. However, IMHO, what’s changing this far faster than Media Studies programs is the exposure of people to the wide-open process and experience of being media producers.
— Clint Brooks Apr 24, 05:57 PM #
Any use of instructional technology has to be organic within the overall course goals, so it’s not surprising that assigning a disproportionately large role to one piece generated poor results.
Even better, though, would be to have the students produce videos that are uploaded to YouTube.
— Jeff Drouin Apr 25, 01:06 PM #
There are outliers where the students are so high end, motivated, and mature that asynchronous learning with lots of video may be far superior, especially for the adult learner.
One such success story with mostly video is the ADEPT (Asynchronous Distance Education ProjecT) Masters of Engineering program at Stanford —- http://scpd.stanford.edu/scpd/about/reports/executivesummary.pdf
Other successes and failures are reviewed at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
— Robert E. Jensen Apr 25, 04:23 PM #