The latent potential of YouTube - Will it become the 21st Century lecturer's film archive?

TL;DR

This paper explores YouTube's potential as a vast online video archive for higher education, discussing its benefits, examples of use, and legal challenges affecting its integration into teaching.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of using YouTube as an educational video archive and analyzes its advantages and legal issues for higher education applications.

Findings

YouTube offers extensive video content suitable for lectures.

Legal and copyright issues limit educational use.

Potential for transforming online video into a teaching resource.

Abstract

YouTube (http://www.youtube.com) is an online, public-access video-sharing site that allows users to post short streaming-video submissions for open viewing. Along with Google, MySpace, Facebook, etc. it is one of the great success stories of the Internet, and is widely used by many of today's undergraduate students. The higher education sector has recently realised the potential of YouTube for presenting teaching resources/material to students, and publicising research. This article considers another potential use for online video archiving websites such as YouTube and GoogleVideo in higher education - as an online video archive providing thousands of hours of video footage for use in lectures. In this article I will discuss why this might be useful, present some examples that demonstrate the potential for YouTube as a teaching resource, and highlight some of the copyright and legal issues that currently impact on the effective use of new online video websites, such as YouTube, for use as a teaching resource.