Using Youtube videos for learning and teaching: a note

In my teaching practice for undergraduate and post graduate students in business and housing studies, I like to produce a teaching plan with lots of links on e-learning resources, e.g., slideshares, Youtube videos and e-articles. Here, I want to talk about Youtube videos for teaching and learning purposes.

On teaching, especially online teaching, I like to play around 3-6 Youtube videos in the lecture to my class, and then teach the topics and concepts with reference to the Youtube videos. This constitute a multimedia-based way to teach lessons. Some students like this approach while others do not. Personally, I learn a lot via an exploratory way on Youtube video study, I am quite confident that a carefully selected set of Youtube videos are very useful for teaching (and students' learning). Moreover, students can study the Youtube videos after the class to consolidate their lecture learning. This leads to the second topic here: on learning.

Regarding students' learning, Youtube videos are quite good as this multimedia format in very often better for conveying knowledge than books and articles which are not multimedia in format. Nevertheless, some of my students complain that it is a "waste of time" to study Youtube videos. Many of these student prefer conventional spoon-feeding of "knowledge" by the lecturers in class. There is, thus, a mismatch of understanding on teaching quality between some of my students and me, as a lecturer. This problem, in my view, should be resolved by matching students' learning mentality to the teachers' teaching style. Simply, I am not keen on doing "spoon-feeding" kind of teaching. One thing about learning by studying Youtube videos is that, it is quite tiring to watch more than 3 videos at one time.  One major reason is that, when watching the videos, you are absorbing and evaluating the video contents, which is very often an intensive intellectual exercise of yours. Nevertheless,  in the evening, studying 2 to 3 Youtube videos in a relaxed, yet engaging way is quite befitting to part-time students, who are tired from day-time work whereas reading a book or an academic article is felt to be quite taxing.

 

To laud Youtube videos as a useful teaching and learning resource is not to denigrate other types of study materials, i.e., books and articles. All these types of learning materials should be used in a blended way for engaging teaching and learning; this then is my view on the value of Youtube videos as a e-learning resource.