How to Use YouTube to Get Your Students to Connect

I hate technology. I say this all the time (though, yes, I do identify the hypocrisy of one saying she hates technology as she uses a blog, Facebook, Gmail, and her iPhone), but I also have to admit when it makes your life easier. Enter YouTube.  

This ever-changing technological world has a number of new ways of doing things without as many suggestions for doing these new things well. More and more colleges are offering online classes, but several students get lost in the cracks. Some students are transferring from one learning platform to another, which causes a learning curve, and some students are transitioning from in-person classes to online classes, getting lost in the world of 1s and 0s where there is no face-to-face interaction for lectures much less for asking and answering questions. But can you believe that YouTube is the savior in this situation? If you’re an instructor having a hard time getting your students to connect, take a look at why YouTube could be the best thing for your online classroom.

It Works

I teach creative writing at a local community college in Arizona. Our town is small and rural, and students from all over Northern Arizona take online classes that are either transferrable for their degree, or their taking creative writing classes as a way of providing an educational challenge to meet their often rural lifestyle. Some students have informed me that socializing with the students in our online class is the only socializing that they get, based on where they live.

When I first started teaching online classes, I merely used the online educational platform –Blackboard. In fact, it was all I could manage considering I had never done this before and I felt I was juggling many balls in the air. If any student thinks that I require too much online posting in my discussion boards (yes, I do), they don’t realize that it’s infinitely harder for me to read all of them and grade all of them. That’s fine –I’m not complaining, I’m merely stating that teachers put a lot of work into discussion boards. I might add that the discussion boards seem to be the only thing that the students are reading, so they have no idea how much work I’ve put into the Assignments tab, or into the weekly update tabs, and the only other thing they read is the Announcements board, and even that is because I click on the option to email the class immediately.

So if I was putting all of this work into Blackboard, how come I still got emails from students reflecting that they couldn’t connect to the class? I mean, they have 3 discussion board posts a week, and for each post I require 250 words of an initial reply and three 50-word replies to their classmates. So if 9 of the 12 posts weekly are replies to classmates, then how come they can’t connect? And if I’m replying to almost every post and posting weekly memos on Announcements and they feel like they’re not connecting or getting enough instruction, what more can I do that I haven’t already done?

Enter YouTube. This is the second semester I’ve been posting weekly updates as YouTube videos. Instead of typing out announcements with important information for the class, I’ll film a video on my MacBook Pro and then upload the file to YouTube. Then I can post the YouTube link in the announcement and mail it out. Student can’t speed-read and miss information in a YouTube video, and they can see a face which makes them feel like they’re getting the benefit of human interaction. Since I’ve been using YouTube videos, I have noticed a spike in interaction among the discussion boards. While students aren’t posting their own YouTube videos, being able to see a face (my face) has been enough for them to feel a sense of community and therein a sense of loyalty to the members of the community.

How to Do It

If you want to use your own YouTube videos to create a sense of community and a human face in your online class, follow these instructions.

1.     Your video shouldn’t be too long or too short. It should be short enough that your students can make time to watch the video, but not so long that students see the time clock on the video and decide they don’t have time for it. A nice minimum time is about 3 or 4 minutes, and a good maximum time is about 15 minutes, definitely not exceeding 20 minutes. Also, make sure that everything you say is poignant and relevant to the class. Students are less likely to watch the whole video if they think that you’re rambling or if what you are saying isn’t relevant to them.

2.     After you film your video in PhotoBooth, right click on the icon of the video and select Export. This will save it as a file on your computer. TIP: Save it as a file that you’ll want it to be saved as on YouTube. When I save a file for my class, I’ll usually start with the section number, and then I’ll name the video based on the week right after the section number, and the term (ex. Spring 2014) at the end of the file name. This is a great way to file because there will not be any duplicates.

3.     Go to www.Youtube.com and sign in. Once you do, there is a button on the top: “Upload.” When it takes you to the new screen, click “Select Files for Upload.” Once you click on your file and the process begins, it predicts what your url is going to be. After your file is loaded, you can select which thumbnail of the three that you would prefer.

4.     Copy and paste the url to wherever you need it to go. This is often where I paste it in Announcements on Blackboard.

Not Teach Online?

If you don’t teach online, that doesn’t mean that you can’t use YouTube for additional resources. For in-class classrooms in any grade, you can use clips of pre-exisiting YouTube videos as a great way to focus or to access your students. Find what they like and play it as a way of getting their interest.

Another thing you can do with YouTube videos is to film segments of your lecture and post them on YouTube so that your students can have additional resources for studying. Here’s another great tip: if your lecture is, for example, on a story arc and the video records every basic element of that story arc that you spend every year describing, you can play the video or direct the students to that video instead of prepping that lecture every year. YouTube can save you a lot of time if you let it.