"Educational" videos on Youtube
Youtube is full of videos that try to teach you something or at least convey information, but there is an equally large number of videos that are only trying to make you think you are learning so you keep watching.
Lets outline the major forms of content on youtube:
- Minecraft Monster school or Fake AI Science Channels: The deepest rabbit holes of youtube, keep everybody you know away form them.
- Reaction: "famous people" screaming into the camera. Usually a collection of clips form twitch livestreams. An endless source of memes with no useful information, sometimes the person reacting pretends to be qualified to make "educational comments" to make the audience feel like they are learning. The only "good" reaction channel I found where some educational reacting is going on is Insider.
ScienceSmashing: A list of youtube channels where a bunch of people dress up in white coats and throw melons from the worlds highest buildings for the sake of science. Although these are better than reaction videos, the information from them is for all purposes useless. Often the bigger attraction is the reaction of the youtuber to what happened. eg. Mr. Beast- Top 10: Although the greatest things are always impressive, it isn't particularly useful information, if there is any, it is just numbers spoken by a computer voice. The lowest are titled "Top 10 Real Aliens" and contain photographys of lens flares accompanied by dramatic music.
- Clickbait educational videos: a list of youtubers that are on (and are advertising) Nebula. Many videos contain same dramatic music and often lots of stock images and cover trivial topics, although there is sometimes quite a bit of research behind those videos, and a few contain actually useful information. This category of content fills up the full range from lies and silly conspiracy theories, to convincing videos that made by unqualified people with bad information, to qualified people people with good information using clickbait and other methods to make their videos more appealing and increase watch time. These clickbait educational videos transition into actually good channels.
- Actually good channels: There are 2 separate types here:
- small (or not so small) channels run by one person (or a small team) covering a very specific topic eg: LockPickingLawyer
- big channels that are to big to fail run by big teams with multiple secondary channels, shows, and podcasts on many platforms eg. LinusTeckTips and his other channels and MKBHD
Many people get stuck in in one of the upper categories claiming that they are learning while watching them, not knowing that they are supporting an array of greedy channels that spread useless or even harmful information while not watching actually hardworking creators that both present better information and deserve more support.
Moreover, unaware teachers are unable to select and show good channels, they often pick videos based on whether they like how the speaker's looks and don't research or mention sources where students can get proper information on the topic.
Older teachers used to TVs and television advertisements don't skip ads on youtube likely because they are unaware how unmonitored the platform is, even if the video is good, the creator often tries to sell his "learning website" for an unreasonable price. If everyone watching that ad would instead take out their computers and collectively create a list of all truly good videos or if everyone who actually falls for that ad, was to instead donate that money to a professional team to make a list of free videos on same topics, the result would be free high quality educational videos at a fraction of the cost.
Take Khan Academy for example, for some $350M (a pathetic fraction of the US education spendings) it produced an enormous amount of helpful videos on almost any topic, although those videos aren't perfect and don't make normal education completely obsolete, they can be a much more efficient at teaching than a lot of the contents teachers show in class (which they often pay for). Combined with the Large Language Models (which are free) school should put informing their students about how to access all of this content and tools their top priority.
Despite teachers best efforts and enormous amounts of money spent, "The Indian guy on Youtube" is still has the best explanation. At least to me, it is obvious that the single most useful and cost efficient improvement for education would be to use BRUTE FORCE (on the videos).
JUST MAKE A LIST OF ALL THE GOOD VIDEOS
If a student doesn't understand a topic, he will go through all videos one by one until he finds one that is clear. So what if the school was to save that student the time and put up a guide directly on the homepage with links to the best videos for any topic, and even better: cut out the part where the student sits in the classroom for an hour not understanding anything.
The more global and advanced this guide is, the better. A school might only be to copy the link to the first video in the search results, but what prevents a department of education from creating a database with hundreds of videos on duplicate topics, and even better: use AI to predict what exact video would be the easiest to understand for any particular student cutting out the "brute forcing bad videos process" students would usually do, given benefits and the tiny amounts of money involved LLMs could be attached to each student to generate personalized answers that would can replace tired misunderstanding teachers.
Unfortunately nobody (especially the teachers) don't seem to know what truly good educational videos look like. Allow me to give you a list of channels that despite being small, simple and not having enormous teams behind them, are actually really good. Please notice that none of them have dramatic background music, NordVPN ads or clickbait titles that teachers seem to consider a sign of low quality:
(Good channels that are slightly in the clickbait range)
Mentions:
Channels I mentioned in the main text body.
Boris Trushin (Russian)
Tom Scott (Is Good but not educational)
I would consider any video from any of those channel better then the first search result on the same topic.
Now about the differences:
- If it is an AI voice reading from a script, you can try copy pasting the transcript into google, you will probably find the article it was stolen from accompanied by more helpful images than the wallpaper reading the script.
- Too many jokes, metaphors, and stock images: clickbait and probably won't teach you much. If this is the only video on the topic, then it is better than nothing, but there should generally be a better video out there.
- If you turned on a video and there is lots of "hypothetical far future" (like many Kurzgesagt videos) you can safely click away from it, you won't be missing out on anything within your lifetime.
- Any TOP videos are designed for people to sit and wait for number one to appear. Sometimes the lower numbers are made unimpressive so people keep watching because "the next one will be where the real deal starts." You won't learn or remember anything, and if you are really curious about the topic, there are better videos out there.
- "Smashing" Experiment videos: you won't need the information about melons under a press, admit that you are there for the show, and don't think that the people performing them are "scientists" because they dressed up in white coats.
- Good channels are usually small, run by one person, and they cover topics by getting straight to the point without intros or particularly big introductions. The best videos present their information without any holes and mention the answers to most questions you might have - building a solid understanding of the topic.
- Bad videos explain topics by simplifying them, good videos feature experts that can make topics easy to understand without having to simplify them (or they simplify them correctly, allowing any additional information to attach to the already existing just as easily).
- A person who simply researched on the internet is not enough for a good video, although there are 2 exceptions:
- Really big channels with really big teams who have a high quality bar and employ good researches who consult experts behind the scenes to ensure they are making actually good videos.
- A student explaining the topic: these are usually good because the person is learning for himself, is using "If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough explanation" as his base, and the perspective of a clueless viewer is fresh in his mind. Afterwards the student makes a video "for his past self" which is extremely useful for the people who are still at square one.
- Very qualified youtube channel rater