Ask a person 5 years ago where they would go to look up how to do something they don't know and the answer would be something along the lines of "I'd Google it." Although that answer is still popular today, another medium is educating America for free: YouTube. It's a simple as typing in "How to check your car's oil?" and within a few minutes you're well on your way to learning the basics about car maintenance and care in a step by step video. YouTube isn't anything that's all too new for younger generations, but it is changing the way we look at education.
No longer do we have to go to a high end university to learn the basics of coding web pages when just a few YouTube videos can be the equivalent to sitting in on a once a week lecture hall. Almost one third of Internet users are subscribers to the popular video upload website, which rounds out to over a billion people accessing and contributing unique content each ad every week. It's even more popular that any other cable provider within the 18-39 year old audiences, meaning a big opportunity not only for a constant stream of new content to feed this demand but also a huge market potential for companies to brand and promote themselves.
Over 100 hours of content is uploaded every minute on a given day on YouTube, which means there's bound to be information on most every topic imaginable. This not only means people out of formal schooling can improve their skill set but also it can help educators fill in any information they were not able to cover in class time on to an easy and accessible platforms for students. YouTube EDU is collection of over 65,000 lectures from 300 universities, meaning students in high school can get a taste of collegiate level lectures as well as just the everyday person looking for an interesting topic to learn about for the day. One of the biggest leaders in online education on YouTube is TED talks, which features over 1900 free lectures on a variety of current issues and perspectives, which have received over 450,000 views per day.
From a personal perspective, being a college student who has dealt with professors who just didn't make the cut in terms of teaching students material, YouTube has been a life saver for me. I could go to a 90 minute lecture about statistics and be more confused than ever, or I could spend those 90 minutes listening to lectures from universities around the country teaching me step by step how to do multiple regression analysis and how to interpret it. No doubt, this realization made going to that statistics class on a regular basis that much harder. Why would I pay for a professor to lecture about material in a way that no one understands and not answer student's questions directly when I could receive a higher quality lesson for free at any time of day? This is the current dilemma for some students who have been in the same shoes as me. As much as we'd like, YouTube doesn't offer degrees, so attending that unfortunate afternoon lecture is a must until teachers and professors within the high school and collegiate level realize that their competition for jobs spreads to more than just the other professors in the nation who would vie for a chance to have their position, but also the numerous resources online competing for students attention as well.
