Edutainment: Advantages and Disadvantages of Learning on YouTube

A new form of education is currently becoming more and more popular on the Internet, specifically the video-sharing platform — YouTube. Children and young adults alike prefer finding videos on the platform about the hard topics they're studying. As a result, they're interacting with the subject more and learning it better.

The topics on which you can find educational videos on YouTube vary greatly: everything from fixing your motorbike to baking a cake and understanding trigonometric formulas. Of course, such a useful information source isn't passing by unnoticed by teachers and tutors alike. From primary school to universities, the teaching staff incorporates this Edutainment into their curriculum.

However, is this actually good? Should the teachers and tutors stop showing the students video materials from YouTube? Let's examine the issue and find out.

Firstly, we'll be looking at all the positive aspects of edutainment. Here's how using YouTube as a learning platform can benefit students:

One of the best things about YouTube is that it's free. Unlike MOOC platforms, like Coursera, edX, Skillshare, and other similar services — you don't have to pay to watch videos on YouTube. In fact, you don't even need a Google account to watch a video, just a link directing you to the video.

Both tutors and students don't have to be confined to a single physical place when using YouTube as a learning platform. Especially during the times of social distancing and the dangers of coronavirus infection, this is extremely useful. Distant learning becomes an easy and smooth experience, which isn't always the case when using specific software systems.

Just like using an essay writing service, utilizing YouTube as a source for additional information on the subject or more intricate explanations of the related problems can become a useful tool to boost classroom education. It's a well-known fact that some students learn much more effectively on their own than inside a classroom. So, YouTube can also be used in combination with classroom learning.

Not every student comes from a family with a high income, and sadly, more often than not, students can't afford to get a personal tutor. This, of course, leads to lowered academic performance, reduced test scores, and fewer possibilities for higher education later on (if any). This is where YouTube comes to shine because self-learning is much easier, thanks to this platform.

Another great aspect of YouTube is just how big of a platform it is. There are so many educators on so many different topics that it's almost unbelievable that YouTube doesn't have a subscription fee. Thanks to the abundance of options, students can pick out the video formats and learning styles that suit them the most.

Having reviewed the biggest positives of using YouTube as a learning platform, let's examine Edutainment's downsides. There have to be at least some disadvantages to YouTube:

Just like with Wikipedia, information correctness and reliability are a problem on YouTube. Just because the video is popular doesn't mean that it contains correct information on the subject. The use of questionable source and direct misinformation in some cases are extremely bad for students.  For young adults who are interested in a subject but don’t have the flexibility to attend a traditional classroom, Victoria University Online or another virtual accredited post-secondary institution may be a more worthwhile investment. Not only will the material in these online courses provide the correct information, but students will also receive some kind of certification to show for all their time and effort spent learning.

YouTube is a general-purpose video-sharing website. Of course, the content varies a lot — you see lullaby videos for children alongside psychological horror sketches on the platform. This aspect of the platform makes it hard to entrust to young children for self-exploration

If you don't have any way to access the Internet in a classroom — that's it; you can't use YouTube. Moreover, teachers can't rely on all students to have reliable access to the web (or even have it all). So, by recommending YouTube to students, exclusion from the learning of some students may occur.

Because YouTube is a free-to-access platform, it has to make money somehow. Its owners do it by showing ads to the video viewers and getting revenue from the advertised companies. Although a simple business plan, it can have negative effects on young minds. Advertising to children is on its own a very questionable practice, but when the teacher sends a link to a YouTube video, they're basically connecting various brands with the process of education itself.

In the end, the question of whether Edutainment is good or bad is just too complex to answer briefly. We can just look at how YouTube is being more and more introduced into the classrooms around the country and closely watch the developments.