Clifton and Mann, Can YouTube enhance student nurse learning?

Clifton and Mann present several arguments to support the applicability and utility of YouTube as a learning medium and tool. I agree on several of their points and I believe that YouTube should not be dismissed as a teaching tool. The authors point out that already, many mainstream organizations have established YouTube channels for disseminating information and content. The latest generation of students is well acquainted with YouTube and digital content. These students will most probably resist a traditional teaching curriculum that is devoid of electronic assets; for example, a class where the schedule and assignments are only written on a whiteboard and students must notate and reproduce the information. This would not be acceptable to students today. There is an expectation for such information to be published electronically.

I believe that this discussion should make a distinction between employing on-demand digital media over the internet and utilizing YouTube as a specific product/service. YouTube’s goals are generating advertising revenue and keeping their visitors on the YouTube site for as long as possible. The interface can be quite distracting if used in a learning context, especially for today’s students that are more easily distractible. Although YouTube can be employed as a teaching tool with varying levels of success, YouTube was not designed for this purpose. YouTube does enjoy a high level of adoption and a vast array of public content; you enjoy and utilize free content but you give up control and must submit to advertising. I believe that on-demand digital media on the internet can be incorporated into an interface that is specifically designed for that purpose.

Several psychological principals come into play with employing digital media for education. Clifton and Mann discuss surface learning vs. deep learning. One unintended consequence of a popular educational YouTube channel, Khan Academy, was that YouTube’s restrictions on the length of a video may have actually benefited the viewers. These videos are all about ten minutes in length and have been argued to be an ideal duration from a retention point-of-view. Although these videos have been popular, there have been challenges with schools that want access but have poor internet bandwidth. The YouTube model does not help. A new system was developed where the original videos were hosted on a local server in the school’s local area network and served from there. An educational media server platform should provide a flexible model that can accommodate these scenarios.