What is YouTube?
YouTube is a content sharing website where you can upload any type of video for the world to see. Google Inc’s YouTube said “1 billion unique users were now visiting the video-sharing website every month, or nearly one out of every two people on the Internet” (The Huffington Post, 2013). Due to it being easily accessible and having a vast amount of content on the website, it is bound to have what you are looking for. For educational purposes, there might be videos of college professors explaining whatever topic it is that you have searched. YouTube states that “300 hours’ worth of content gets uploaded to the main site every minute” (CNET, 2014). So why would you use YouTube as a learning tool?
Advantages
- The interface of the whole website is very simple with a clear search bar being at the top of the web page.
- The website doesn’t require you to have an account so it is as easy as just typing in YouTube.com into your browser.
- Depending on your internet speeds, YouTube offers the videos in different qualities ranging from 360p to 4K now. This flexibility allows you to consider your options because if you are out and using 3G/4G then ideally you don’t want to be streaming in 1080p because it’ll waste your given data and then you’ll have to start paying Ludacris prices because you’ve gone over your limit. If you are only intending on hearing what a person is explaining on a certain topic and you don’t require looking at the video itself, you can afford to put the quality to 360p and just listen.
- Favours visual learners and those that need to hear something twice to understand. Teachers, Professionals, just about anyone can upload a video that shows them explaining a certain topic that you might be stuck on.
- As a service YouTube is one of the most reliable out there for safety as its ‘parent’ company is Google (www.google.co.uk), which is up there with one of the most dominant companies in the world. This means that if you decide to create an account, so that you can save your video in a file to go back to, your information will be kept safe. This also means that YouTube rarely has any ‘downtime’ due to too much server traffic as they will always be prepared for instances where there might be high traffic.
Disadvantages
- There might be the odd ‘spam’ video that has no relation to what you typed into the search bar.
- There’s a risk that the person who has uploaded the educational video has absolutely no idea what they are talking about which leads you to become more confused and worse off.
- Very easy to get distracted from your work since at the end of the video, a suggested videos option comes up. So, there could be cases where you go on YouTube just look at how you work something out and you end up watching Squirrels Jet Ski.
- Advertisements can be annoying and spam.
How it helped me
For example, throughout my Chemistry A-Level I used YouTube to help me visualise how a proton NMR spectra (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0eR8YqcA8c) works because the way that the textbooks explained it, I still couldn’t get my head around it. I’m personally someone who can’t read a textbook and straight away understand it, I have to have it explained to me or I go through many example questions for me to understand something fully. When it came to the exam period I could constantly relate back to the same video and refresh my memory on how to understand the graphs which is the area that I struggled with the most. Probably the luckiest thing I did this because the last question on one of my papers was a big 9 marker on Proton NMR!
Overview
Overall YouTube is a very useful learning tool as it’s always there with the same video that you might have seen previously that explained your problem in such a way that you understood it. In effect, it acts as an ‘extra lesson’ but on a specific topic so hopefully your questions will be answered. In some cases, it allows for further research to be done into a topic if it goes on to say a suggested video has some relevance.
Referencing
The Huffington Post Article (May 21st, 2013),
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/21/youtube-stats_n_2922543.html, accessed 15/11/16.
YouTube’s Music Key: Can paid streaming finally hook the masses? (November 12th,2014),
https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-music-key-googles-stab-at-taking-paid-streaming-songs-mainstream/, accessed 17/11/16.