The global YouTube EDU portal provides access to a wide range of video resources related to academia. These include lectures, demonstrations, interviews, and other types of resources.
The aggregation of educational video resources, created in March 2009, includes the collective works of hundreds of universities around the world.
There are a number of ways to search the video resources.
By university
At the top of the site is a visual scroll bar which allows users to surf specific channels of more than a dozen universities, including Harvard, The Open University, Florida International, Ohio University, Northeastern University, UCLA, USC, Vassar, Penn State, Johns Hopkins, and Cal State Northridge. The sites are represented by an icon and then the number of videos available and their respective number of views.
An example of Johns Hopkins University channel follows, with a featured video and then a sampling of the thematic video playlists to the right. Below is recent activity information along with Profile information. Individuals may subscribe to the respective channels through RSS feeds.
By topic
Another search method in the YouTube Education portal involves the use of the domain or topic search by categories. These categories include Business, Education, Engineering, Fine Arts & Design, Health & Medicine, History, Humanities, Journalism & Media, Law, Literature, Mathematics, Science, and Social Science.
Clicking outside these categories will take the user outside of the educational portal to another part of YouTube.
For example, clicking on the Engineering site will lead a user to a series of Engineering videos, presented in order of popularity. This site is generated dynamically, which means that it will change depending on when a user requests the particular educational category.
By stand-alone search
If the user is looking for a specific resource, there is a search bar of the YouTube EDU space at the top right. This search bar offers a pure by-text search.
A search of K-State results in some 440 videos.
Using the video resource
Once the resource has been found, an instructor may link to it directly based on the URL or embed the code using the “Embed” button beneath the video.
Some other academic video options
AcademicEarth is another space for educational video resources. Video interviews and presentations by academics are also available at BigThink.
