Visual Turn

youtube edu

world-shaker:

bfour:

websuccessdiva:

Recently YouTube EDU, a section of YouTube that showcases videos from colleges and universities, celebrated its one year anniversary. This section of YouTube often gets overlooked by many users. It shouldn’t; it is a vault of free education that others pay thousands of dollars a year to access. For many of us in the marketing industry, college is a distant memory, but it doesn’t mean we should ignore the information being shared with today’s students. After all, it could also help improve our own strategies.

Without a doubt YouTube EDU and other open educational repositories are wonderful resources. (I’m currently working through Yale Prof. Paul Fry’s course on literary theory, which is excellent!) But two comments from the OP made me think about the purpose of education. The OP first equates education with information. Second is the idea that such education will help marketers with their own strategies. Both are valid and common views of education — as an instrumental means to improve our individual careers and our roles in the fabric of the economy.

As someone who thinks a lot about the purpose of education for adults in general — and informal adult education on the web in particular — I prefer to think that it provides another sort of benefits, more along the lines of the original “liberal” and “progressive” educations of a century or more ago. There is no test to pass at the end of a YouTube EDU video course, no grade assigned, no credit hours added to a transcript, no degree leading to a promotion or a better job.

So what do we get out of it? Information, of course, but more than that. We obtain a genuine opportunity to think freely, to synthesize the meaning of the information and integrate it into our world view. It is an education that does not need to serve an instrumentalized purpose, to improve a skill, or a career, or make us better at our jobs.

Instead this kind of informal adult learning can serve a higher purpose of permitting a type of education that has largely been lost in our culture: the luxury of indulging in an education that makes us better thinkers, and thus better able to contribute to our community and our society. To my view, that is one of the radical transformations of open educational resources: they give informal adult learners the opportunity to pursue their individual interests, at their own pace, and for their personal enrichment.