Learning from YouTube: Popular Culture and Geography Distance Education

• Project Team: Benjamin NewmanColin LorneGeorge Revill
• Subject Discipline: Social Sciences and Global Studies
• Theme: Multisensory/multimodal learningOnline and blended tuition
• Project Aim: Enables more students to achieve their study goalsImproves and enhance the learning experience of students
• Status: Live

The purpose of this project is to explore the potential of thinking from popular and everyday online media spaces such as YouTube. Video sharing sites like YouTube and TikTok and audio-based podcasting platforms have grown exponentially in recent years as technological innovations have made the processes of production, editing, and storing digital content easier and cheaper. These sites are now part of the daily consumption of practices of millions of people worldwide and are used by students as part of their learning practices.

Given that distance-learning teaching makes use of bespoke audio-visual assets, there is much to learn as to the way in which content creators on these platforms deploy particular modes of storytelling and engage with different formats to attract, engage, and retain their audience. Reflections on these sites will allow the project team to consider an exciting form of distance pedagogy informed by turns in popular culture.

By scrutinising these audio-video platforms and their content for what they might reveal about different styles and formats of AV assets, the project team will test these learnings by creating, piloting, and evaluating a small tranche of learning materials to act as a bridge between levels of study on Geography and Environmental Studies modules.

This pilot project will have three distinct phases:

1. Research and discovery

This phase of the project involves critically examining content sharing websites including their format, modes of storytelling, production techniques, and interfaces. And exploring published literature on popular culture, pedagogy, and audio-visual storytelling.

1. Production of assets

Taking the learnings from phase 1, this part of the project will involve producing a set of audio-visual assets that will serve the Geography and Environmental Studies degrees and support students in moving between study levels.

1. Reflection and dissemination

In the final part of this project, the project team will engage students in the testing and learning process. Drawing upon a small cohort of students, we will solicit feedback on the learning materials generated to develop our pedagogical understanding of using audio-visual assets in distance learning.