By Amanda Gregorio, The Charlatan
Imagine a future where you submit video projects instead of essays. Where your textbook links you to online videos instead of 60-page papers. Imagine a future where you engage in your own learning, rather than sitting through a lecture. There are people out there working to make this future possible . . .
Online there are countless YouTube personalities with a mission to teach you one new thing every day—or at least help you understand what is so important about The Great Gatsby. They are the minds behind shows such as Crash Course, SciShow, VSauce, CGP Grey, The Brain Scoop, Mental Floss, Minute Physics, and countless others. They are also the people at TED-Ed, who work with animators to bring lessons to life.
At Carleton, they are the people who ensure you can study in your pyjamas on your couch by creating content with professors for online classes and broadcasting Video-On-Demand classes. They also create online content for professors to use in CULearn and in class.
And they all have the same goal in mind: getting you, the student, engaged in learning.
Crash Coursing to success
“Crash Course has been an invaluable tool for a lot of students that need that supplementary visual help to grasp something that’s being taught in class, so it’s kind of neat to see how helpful that is,” Suzanna Brusikiewicz, co-founder and head of the art department at Thought Café said.
Thought Café describes itself as “a motion graphic studio that promotes critical awareness.” The company works closely with several Education YouTube channels, including Crash Course, which currently has 987,972 subscribers.
Hosted by YouTube personalities John and Hank Green, Crash Course is a YouTube channel that focusses mainly on teaching science and humanities. The show’s basis is the advanced placement high school curriculum in the United States, and it uses a mixture of comedy, lecture, and animation to explain complex concepts such as cell division and historical trends, Brusikiewicz said.
The show also attempts to add interesting flair to simpler topics such as the creation of the periodic table.
“It’s very quick moving and exciting and funny as well, so it grabs your attention,” she said.
Jonathon Corbiere is the co-founder and head of the animation department at Thought Café.
“Because it’s so expensive to create animation, video production, all of that stuff, you can never have all the content that needs to be taught to these students,” Corbiere said.
“You can showcase the more complex things that the students are going to have trouble with . . . The reality would be we could see a digital textbook where there are little video sections explaining down complex details about things as you go through the book,” he said.
Hands-on learning
This kind of thinking about the potential of video to educate is not just occurring to those who work in the world of YouTube—it’s also happening right here at Carleton.
Andrew Barrett, assistant director of Carleton’s Educational Development Centre (EDC), said getting students engaged is not just a matter of using an entertaining format. It is also a matter of hands-on learning.
“Rather than using educational content as a way to push at students, it’s getting students creating content, and I think that’s where we’ll see a lot of growth,” Barrett said.
“I think people will be using video instead of handing in an essay or something like that,” he said.
Carleton already provides the software, available on the university website to anyone with a Carleton account, to create this kind of content.
Called Camtasia Relay, it enables students to record video from their webcams or screen-capture. The university also offers a space in Southam Hall called Media Commons, where students and faculty can borrow video cameras, use Macs loaded with photo and video editing software, and use soundproof spaces to record, all with support from staff.
“Anyone with a Carleton account can create video using their laptop . . . It works particularly well with PowerPoint,” Barrett explained.
“It records all the text separately as well, which is nice because with students with learning disabilities, that’s an important factor that it’s not just all video, but you have the text component as well,” he said.
Carleton is a leading university in providing video content, with about 20 per cent of students using video services, Barrett said.
The school offers recorded lectures for many classes called CUTV, which are broadcast live on Rogers, or are available On-Demand (known as VOD classes) for an additional fee. Carleton University Online (CUOL) also has all of these lectures available for viewing in their office in Loeb Building, said Barrett.
In addition, many professors work with EDC to create video to supplement the courses they teach, which EDC and CUOL estimate half of all Carleton students have accessed at least once, he said.
Available to professors are professional, high-quality cameras and crew, as well as a green screen.
However, Barrett said education can never be entirely video-based. Online classes, while supporting substantial video content, still rely on good old-fashioned text as well.
“We think about ‘what’s the goal here?’ because it takes a lot of time . . . And, at the end of the day, it wouldn’t necessarily serve the pedagogical goals of the class as well as some other approaches would,” Barrett said. “It goes back to really picking the right tool for the goals that you have,” he explained.
Education collaboration
Online content providers and Carleton faculty do work together to bring online video content to the classroom, Barrett explained.
“If there’s a really great video, like a TED Talk or something like that, that hits what we want then using that is a good thing,” he said.
“But there’s some areas where the course is specific enough where there’s not a video that would be at the level of detail that we want . . . The Canadian context sometimes isn’t represented as much online,” he explained.
Technology, Entertainment, Design—more commonly known as TED—is recognized widely online for making speeches and presentations by prominent figures, professionals, educators, and celebrities, available online for free.
Barrett said professors of online classes frequently use it, especially since TED has begun an initiative called TED-Ed that enables animators, such as Thought Café, to illustrate lessons with complex or difficult subjects for professors to use in the classroom.
Stephanie Lo, director of programs for TED-Ed, said they created a website so people can access any educational video they create and be able to ask questions about it.
“We have an open nomination process where . . . anyone who wants to communicate a short lesson can nominate themselves or be nominated to work with us,” she explained. “We work with them to create an approximately three-minute-lesson, and then we have the same process . . . an open nomination process with animators.”
Lo said much of her job involves collaborating with educators.
“I end up working with a lot of teachers and a lot of students to figure out ‘how is our content useful?’ And then figuring out ‘what can we do to support educational systems best?’” she said.
The price of knowledge
A challenge that faces all video educators is funding. Barrett said Carleton funds the EDC and CUOL to ensure the most high-quality equipment and video is available to students. However, sites like TED and YouTube often struggle to stay afloat in the competitive world of online video. Most YouTube education channels self-produce and are funded by their creators, occasionally using ad revenue through one to two minute ads at the beginning of videos, according to the co-founders of Thought Café.
Crash Course is unique in that it receives funding from Google on top of ad revenue to cover starting costs. However, that funding is only temporary and the show is trying to work away from being reliant on advertising. Crash Course is looking into subsidizing the show using a model called Subbable, which allows educators and viewers to donate a regular amount towards the show’s continuation, said the Thought Café founders.
“I think it is fair to ask teachers or school boards and students, to some degree, to donate whatever they can to fund content that’s helped them out,” Corbiere said. “I see Subbable as subsidizing.”
Brusikiewicz agreed.
“With Subbable, it does give the audience a bit of leeway and control as to the future of the show, what topics are covered,” Brusikiewicz said. “So the nice thing about it is it gives everybody a chance to partake in what they want to see Crash Course become.”
Both co-founders agreed that with initiatives like Kickstarter and Indiegogo enabling practical crowd- funding projects, perhaps paying for the online educational content is the future as much as submitting video assignments instead of essays is.
At least for now, ‘free’ is key in the world of online video educators, and they would like to keep it that way for as long as possible.