You Can Get an Ivy League Education for Free on YouTube Edu

When my daughter describes some stupid comment someone has told her, I often respond with, "He must have learned that at YouTube University." I have heard other people use a similar expression in reference to Google University. The gist of what we are trying to say is that there is so much misinformation and propaganda on the internet, that it has led many people to believe that they have become educated on a subject when they really haven't. The value of information that one accesses on the internet is only as good as the source it comes from.

I thought I had pretty much exhausted any worthwhile videos on YouTube, when I logged on to it yesterday and noticed something I had never noticed before on YouTube's home page. In the right hand column of the home page, just under the What's New box, is a banner that says YouTube Edu Learn More.

I clicked on the banner and to my amazement found out that there really is a YouTube University. YouTube Edu is a separate part of YouTube dedicated to videos which are exclusively provided by qualifying two- and four-year degree granting public and private colleges and universities. Each college or university has its own channel, similar to channels on cable television.

Because these channels can only be set up by a college or university official, rather than just anybody, there are few videos that I would classify as junk. Not all videos are educational. There are some promotional videos, sports videos and videos about campus life.

Even though I just discovered YouTube Edu, it has been on the internet for a couple years. The University of California at Berkeley, always innovative, was the first university to put entire courses on YouTube. Berkeley offers such courses as Chemistry 3B: Chemical Structure and Reactivity, Physics for Future Presidents, and General Psychology.

Other colleges and universities soon followed Berkeley. Some of the colleges and universities with Edu channels are Amherst College, Brandeis University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Harvard Business School, MIT, Princeton, Purdue, UCLA and Yale. There are well over one hundred colleges represented on YouTube Edu.

Besides showing videos of complete courses from various universities and colleges, YouTube Edu provides viewers the opportunity to watch lectures by important visiting scientists, writers, politicians, religious leaders and so on. You can even improve your guitar playing and other musical abilities by watching instructional videos from the Berklee College of Music.

Not every university represented on YouTube Edu is living up to its potential. For example, my alma mater, the University at Albany, has twenty-seven videos on its channel, but almost none of them are educational in nature.

I have noticed a few other minor, but fixable, problems with YouTube Edu. First, Some colleges have not organized their videos well, so that you have to browse through several hundred videos to find something you want to watch. The best sites have organized their videos into categories such as courses, sports, campus life, etc.

There is one problem I noticed that only YouTube can fix. When you are done viewing a video and want to go to a different college channel, you have to click on the back arrow icon or go to your history folder to find the YouTube Edu directory of college channels. If you click on channels at the top of the page, you will not to to YouTube Edu's channels as you might think, but you will go to all of YouTube's channels. From the Channel page, it is not obvious how to navigate back to Edu.

From YouTube's main channel page, you have to click on the education category to find YouTube Edu. Unfortunately, you will find videos in YouTube's education category that have nothing to do with education. In fact some of the videos listed in Youtube's education category have titles that I cannot repeat here because of the words in them.

YouTube Edu does have its own separate link on the Education Categories page, which is helpful. However, the placement of YouTube Edu on the same page with videos that are the opposite of what it is all about, harms the reputation of YouTube Edu. Unmonitored comments also hurt the reputation of YouTube. Some colleges have fixed that problem by disabling the comment feature.

I think it would benefit YouTube and all of the colleges and universities associated with it, if YouTube Edu was moved to a separate website. Such a move might induce more colleges to sign up. Some might not want to be associated with the site, due to all of the junk that is on YouTube.

In spite of the above caveats, I highly recommend YouTube Edu. By using YouTube Edu, you can educate yourself without paying tuition, buying books or even leaving your house.