Is YouTube an OER repository?
On the negative side:
1. YouTube videos may contain copyright infringements.
2. No guarantee of quality.
On the positive side:
1. There are multitudes of film clips with good educational content.
2. It’s free.
3. Clips are technologically reusable – kind of. You have to know how to do it.
4. YouTube.edu may begin to encourage better quality.
There is overwhelming evidence that many people, especially young (pre-university?) people, use YouTube as their first-port-of-call search engine. I was recently speaking about YouTube with a group of undergraduate medical students, and they admitted YouTube is the first place they go for film clips of any kind of clinical practice.
Not only does YouTube contain OERs, it can be used to advocate OERs. To illustrate, I give you OER FAQs by Beyond Distance’s Dr Sahm Nikoi.
What do you think about YouTube as an OER repository?
Terese Bird, Learning Technologist, Beyond Distance Research Alliance, University of Leicester
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/valpo/uploads – Example Youtube EDU feed – no mention of licensing, so to me, not OER.
So I guess how open is open
Hello Pat,
Thanks very much for this. I guess I’m revealing my ignorance here, but I’m not sure what you mean by mentioning the license within the feed?
Or do you mean there is no mention of licensing anywhere within that university’s YouTube.edu site?
Terese Bird, University of Leicester Beyond Distance Research Alliance
This is from the OU, no sign of a license anywhere. To me, crudely, no license means it’s not OER.
So no license on the site, or in the feed (Xpert the site i run) harvests feeds so I tend to think of things in that way.
Pat Lockley University of Nottingham
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert
One problem is that only universities in a few countries are allowed to set up on YouTube Edu, and only two-year or four-year formal institutions. And even to get a branded NGO channel that allows you to upload videos longer than 10 minutes requires being a registered non-profit in one of four countries.
However, there is an incredible amount of good and useful videos on YouTube, both by professionals and amateurs, no doubt about it!
Hello Stian,
That is great information; thanks very much. Am I correct in understanding, also, that not every 2-year and 4-year formal institutions in these particular countries are accepted into YouTube.edu— that the institution must show a ‘track record’ of many views on learning material already loaded on regular YouTube? I heard this from someone in my institution but I’ve not heard this from Google; just wondering what you know.
Terese Bird, University of Leicester Beyond Distance Research Alliance
Two years ago the THE award was won by a single lecturer using Youtube – but I don’t think that content is in youtube edu. Also youtube edu has a lot of video clips about sports teams.
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Great point – we made a similar point on our blog recently (smarthistory.org/blog) there are many websites that are in fact “OERs” – many of them produced by museums – but we don’t call them “OERs” and as a result I think our conceptualizing of the future of education really falters.
Good point Beth. I think Pat has identified the problem – for a YouTube video to be (legally) usable, reusable and repurposable, it needs to be have an open licence added to it when it’s uploaded. Many people are doing that now when they upload pictures to Flickr, but the trend doesn’t seem to have caught on in YouTube yet.
Gabi Witthaus (Knowledge Transfer Fellow on the OSTRICH project)
Hi Gabi,
It’s a shame that Youtube and ItunesU don’t allow for CC licensing in their feeds out. It’s also much easier to download from flickr. Perhaps vimeo is a better location for videos.
I’d agree very educational, but makes reuse a bit of a prickly issue.
If people know of any museums with content please let me know.
Thanks
Pat
it certainly seems it could be used this way.