Andrei's blog

"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:

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: 
- Very qualified youtube channel rater