YouTube...The New Visual University

For the millenials, YouTube has become the go-to place for learning things quickly.   It has quickly replaced the book as the place where learning takes place.  The visual has won over the written word. This will have and is having tremendous implications.
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The Startling Statistics and History of YouTube
Google itself describes the amazing growth of YouTube.  It would be natural to suppose that a naturally visual medium like YouTube would not need to resort to words to describe itself.

Despite all these videos, perhaps some words may still serve useful.  As of 9/1/2016 Google reported that:

1.4 billion people use YouTube (18.6% of the world's present population of 7.5 billion)

Every minute 300 hours of video are uploaded

Every day 4.95 billion videos are viewed

Each month 900 million unique visitors visit 

Each month 3.25 billion hours of videos are viewed

Out of those videos 10,113 have generated 1 billion views

70% of the visitors are from outside the USA

There are 42 countries with local versions of YouTube

YouTube broadcasts in 54 languages

1 billion videos are viewed through a mobile device each day

Average time spent on YouTube on a mobile device is 40 minutes

It costs Google $6.4 billion to run and maintain YouTube a year

Google receives $4 billion in revenues each year 

The highest viewed YouTube producer (PewDiePie) earns $7 million a year

But perhaps the most telling thing about what YouTube means was expressed in a short clip featuring Kevin Kelly at a conference



 In an article published in Forbes several years ago, this education revolution was considered.

Ever since Sal Khan shot his video in 2004 to help tutor his young cousin in math, his method morphed into a nonprofit that’s now landed millions in grants from the Gates Foundation and Google GOOGL -0.33%. Khan Academy is currently one of the leading digital education platforms, delivering some 440 million free micro-lectures to 2.2 millionYouTube subscribers. The videos have been viewed over 500 million times. 

Khan’s success has prompted a rash of new online video education superstars. John Green, the cult young-adult novelist, and his younger brother Hank, host and co-write the popular CrashCourse channel with 3.1 million subscribers – almost 1 million more than Khan Academy’s channel.

Now institutions such as MIT, Harvard University, The University Of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, Yale University just to name a few.  In fact, every major university in America has a YouTube channel.  Of course, just because a university has a YouTube channel does not mean they offer free online courses.  But at least 25 of the top universities do.  Among these are the University of Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Duke University, Princeton University, and Oxford University.

As if this is not enough, it is the innumerable small videos done by thousands of people that show everything from recipes to how to use software, even programming.  There are thousands of hours of documentaries that one either can no longer watch on television or that were too controversial to be aired by the corporate media.

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All this seems to be having an effect.  At least, if a college education is counted as being educated.  There is a valid point to be made as to whether a college education today is the equivalent of a college education 20 years ago.  An article no longer available at the Huffington Post site, was quoted here:

For years, states around the country dummied-down standards to make it look as if students were more prepared for success after graduation than they actually were,” Joel Klein said in a New York Post article. “Raising standards will mean we now have a more true measure of how well our students are learning.

But this does not affect the focus of this article which is that there is a paradigm shift away from written media to visual media. It is the visualization of knowledge at incredibly profound level.  Some subjects do not readily lend themselves to visualization.  They are more abstract.  There will have to be new ways to visualize abstract ideas and concepts.

Perhaps those in the educational community were partially right when they emphasized "visualization."  There is an interesting research paper titled, Chapter#: Enhancing Learning With Visualization Techniques by Joris Klerkx, Katrien Verbert and Erik Duval.  In it they give a fascinating introduction to visual learning:

The use of visualization to present information is not new. It has been used in maps and drawings for thousands of years. One famous example is Ptolemy's world map (see Figure 1) that has been created somewhere in the second century BC. Today, the field of visualization has become quite a bit more diverse, with applications such as scientific visualization (Shneiderman & Bederson, 2003), knowledge visualization (Burkhard & Meier, 2005) and visual analytics (Keim et al., 2008).

They go on to say:

Information visualization research is focused on enabling users to control the process of flexibly navigating through information spaces of abstract data, for which there may be no inherent mapping to space or a natural physical reality (Card, Mackinlay, & Klerkx, Verbert & Duval Shneiderman, 1999). 

They make a good point in saying that just because there is an abundance of resources it is only when something is understood that it becomes knowledge and acquires value.

The main intent of information visualization is to represent an abstract information space in a dynamic way, so as to facilitate human interaction for exploration and understanding. It relies on the design of effective and efficient --as well as sometimes playful and aesthetically pleasing-- interactive visual representations that users can manipulate for open-ended exploration or to solve specific tasks. This approach is especially useful when a person does not know what questions to ask about the data or when she wants to ask better, more meaningful questions (Fekete, Van Wijk, Stasko, & North, 2008). Information visualization makes use of the principles in Gestalt Theory regarding the human visual capacity as a powerful pattern-finding engine, to provide a powerful means of making sense of the abundance of available data. For example, the principle of spatial proximity posits that humans instinctively group data points that are perceptually close together. Visual connectedness between data points in the form of an edge between two nodes provides an even stronger relationship.

Marshall McLuhan

All this points to the fact that the future generations will most likely visual learners much like Marshall McLuhan predicted.  There was of course a reaction from academic circles, long use to the book, as the primary medium of learning.  This is described in a fine article by Tony Bates:

...when television started to be used for university teaching, it came as quite a shock to both traditional academics and the Open University students. It should be noted that the BBC producers did NOT replicate the university lecture by using talking heads, but focused instead on non-linear documentaries that were meant to illustrate the academic principles and ideas in the texts, and concrete examples of abstract concepts through cases, models and animation (see Bates, 1984, for more analysis of the role of TV and radio for teaching). In other words, the medium was used quite differently from print (and in my view very appropriately), but for many of our students this was not what they considered a university education to be (but to the credit of many OU academics at the time, they were excited by the teaching possibilities of television and contributed greatly to the design of the programs).

Bates further states:

In my research, the concept of ‘the medium is the message’ was beginning to roll out before my eyes, even though I did not connect the dots at the time. Students were learning differently from television. I find that academics still struggle to understand the potential of non-print media for higher education, because higher education has been defined by the concepts of ‘analytical precision, quantitative analysis and sequential ordering’ which McLuhan argued were the result of print-based representations of knowledge. However, other media offer different ways of representing knowledge that can be as equal or even superior to knowledge represented through print. (One medium is not necessarily better than another – they are just different, and the value of a medium will depend to some extent on the context and purposes for which it is used – to which McLuhan never gave sufficient recognition)

Bates is quoting McLuhan in this book Gutenberg Galaxy where he states:

Print culture, ushered in by the Gutenberg press in the middle of the fifteenth century, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral. [This has resulted in] the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, … the visual homogenizing of experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background. […] ….. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but a separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook.’

Thus it seems, print media's day is setting followed by video/visual sunrise.  Since, we have not even discussed the impact of some sort of neural interface where "facts" will instantly accessible and no longer require memorization, it remains to be seen how this will change what it means to "know" something.