We first blogged several months ago about our C21U TechBurst competition noting several interesting actors providing online video content. Since that time, a number of major players have entered or expanded their involvement in the higher education video market. YouTube and TED have expanded their online offerings to further catalyze change in education, creating venues that allow others to teach their own lessons. This represents an alternative curational strategy, in contrast to creating their own content, as Khan Academy and MITx do. TechBurst occupies a growing place in this arena.

As a platform for delivery, YouTube plays a significant role in the online education revolution as the place where the majority of the educational videos are stored to be searched and shared by curious learners everywhere. In 2009, YouTube began to take a more active role in facilitating the dissemination of online content with the creation of YouTube EDU, a central repository for YouTube partners to feature their educational content. More recently, YouTube developed YouTube for Schools, which posts all the content in YouTube EDU to a separate site without a comment or “similar videos” reference feature. This allows students to access the useful, classroom-relevant content on the YouTube site, while access to the remainder of YouTube’s videos remain behind a school's firewall.

Last week, TED, famous for its conferences and videos on “ideas worth sharing,” announced that it will be embarking on a new project--Ted Ed--in which educators record themselves teaching their most successful lessons. These lessons are then given to animators to bring to life. If the initial collection of videos is any indication, many of the videos resemble the traditional presentation style characteristic of TED talks interspersed with relevant animations; other videos, however, are fully animated or take an alternative approach to messaging. Regardless of the approach, all of the lessons appear interesting, informative, and often challenge the listener to think in new ways. However, the Ted Ed videos do not seem to follow a curriculum, but instead stand alone, challenging the listener with new and innovative ideas, and focus on communities of learners instead of an individual classes or curricula.

C21U’s TechBurst distinguishes itself from other initiatives with similar objectives in that it takes the content creation out of the hands of teachers, and gives it to the students, thus creating a network of students teaching their peers lessons from the Georgia Tech curriculum. Each video is vetted by Georgia Tech faculty to ensure that it maintains Georgia Tech’s academic rigor. Currently, the initial TechBurst library contains 23 videos with a range of subjects that represent a small part of a Georgia Tech classroom experience. However, to create a larger impact, C21U is developing strategic relationships across campus that would cover complete classes in video form with the ultimate goal of having the key components of the Georgia Tech curriculum represented in short video form. Georgia Tech student feedback indicates that the greatest amount of academic interest, on campus and online, focuses on freshman and sophomore level courses; however the greatest need for this kind of video library is in upper level STEM classes, particularly those in physics and engineering. While the TechBurst library will recruit videos from all disciplines and levels of study, it is these junior and senior level STEM classes that might have the greatest impact on a global scale because students indicate that these are resources that do not currently exist.

Ultimately these approaches augment educators’ toolbox of new and interesting ways of teaching, in ways that seek to stimulate greater student engagement in the learning process.