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The Next Chapter for Learning on YouTube

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Re: The Next Chapter for Learning on YouTube

#3
Youtube has great individual creators like 3blue1brown, but I'm skeptical that youtube itself will supply the additional human curation and editing role required to make an educational resource that is consistently coherent and useful across a range of topics (like say, khanacademy.org).

I'm also curious what benefits youtube would provide a creator/educator like, say, musician Charles Cornell, who is already perfectly able to sell his course that he advertises in his youtube videos.

Re: The Next Chapter for Learning on YouTube

#5
> Every day, people come to YouTube to learn something new.

True.

> shows content on commonly used education apps without distractions like ads, external links or recommendations

External links seem important on educational files, and I kind of like recommendations when I'm browsing educational stuff, but whoo, no ads on educational stuff? That's great!

> Next year, qualified creators can begin offering free or paid

There it is.

Re: The Next Chapter for Learning on YouTube

#7
Next year, qualified creators can begin offering free or paid Courses to provide in-depth, structured learning experiences for viewers. Viewers who choose to buy a Course can watch the video ad-free and play it in the background.

So you're cloning Udemy? Meh. Not much to be excited about so far.

Finally, to help learners apply what they’ve learned, we’re introducing Quizzes — a new way for creators to help viewers test their knowledge.

That could be somewhat useful, but..

For example, a math creator who recently posted a series on algebra can create a Quiz on the Community tab to ask their viewers a question related to a concept taught in their latest video.

Does anybody ever actually visit the "Community" tab of a channel? Why add this extra friction? Hasn't the technology progressed to the point that quizzes could be integrated right into the video player? For that matter, why not have "adaptive" videos where your quiz results can affect the video that you see (like triggering an extra in-depth explanation for notoriously tricky topic if the quiz taker scores below a certain level, etc.).

I hope this works out and provides some value, but I have my doubts as it stands.

Re: The Next Chapter for Learning on YouTube

#9
> shows content on commonly used education apps without distractions like ads, external links or recommendations

It's almost like they know how addicting their recommendations and other "distractions" are. They have to make a separate product to actually create a healthy environment for learning.

Re: The Next Chapter for Learning on YouTube

#10

Does it bother anyone else that YouTube has its own TLD (.youtube)? TLDs used to carry a lot of weight, and used to signify something besides individual entities/companies... but it feels to me like that designation is becoming rather diluted.

Personally, I'm quite happy with the proliferation of top level domains. It seems like the alternative was a completely unnecessary layer of indirection; it's not like every .com was a company or every company used a .com, so they weren't even strongly meaningful before.
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