Skip to main content

YouTube users such as MisterNumbers have devoted followings that turn to their video tutorials to supplement their education.

Charlotte Briceno-Sukman could add and subtract numbers just fine. She'd even figured out some simple multiplication. But when dimes and nickels were thrown into the mix, the eight-year-old was stumped.

Does money follow a different numbering system? How many cents are in a quarter?

Her textbook and teacher's instruction didn't help. But YouTube did.

Students - from elementary school to the doctoral level - have turned to the video-sharing site's collection of millions of instructional videos for the same purpose: to supplement their education.

They search YouTube for refreshers on photosynthesis before a biology quiz and look up explanations of the monotonicity theorem after a confusing math class. While some teachers remain hesitant about bringing YouTube into the classroom, students often find the five-minute clips even more useful than their textbooks.

Daria Sukman, Charlotte's mother, says her daughter has used YouTube to learn subjects she doesn't have access to at school. Charlotte taught herself how to play the recorder and has also picked up an impressive French vocabulary - all from videos Ms. Sukman found online.



<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="https://www.youtube.com/v/dCZr-xAbLGM&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="https://www.youtube.com/v/dCZr-xAbLGM&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>


"Different kids learn in different ways. I'm just trying to approach this on a level that works for her - she's a visual learner," Ms. Sukman explains.

Earl Woodruff, an associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, says YouTube videos can often summarize 10 pages of a textbook in five minutes. Not only do students spend less time on the concept, they're often more engaged, he says.

"Because you're speaking to the children and they're seeing the examples, that's multi-modality…[it's]a pretty sure way to reach a larger audience," he says.

Salman Khan has mastered that concept. The 33-year-old Ivy League-educated former hedge fund analyst started the Khan Academy in 2006 - a school based entirely on YouTube videos. It was a part-time gig for a while, but last year he quit his job to make videos full time. He's created more than 1,400 in total, all with the same bare bones format: on a black background, he writes out equations and draws diagrams in neon colours to explain everything from dividing fractions to the French Revolution (that one's a four-parter). He never appears on camera - the viewer just hears his voice. It's to evoke the sense of someone sitting beside you working through a concept, rather than instructing you from the front of a room, he says.

"Someone just sends me a math problem and I put it up and start chatting about it," he says from his home in Mountain View, Calif. "It's easy for me. It becomes stressful to lecture, I think."

Most striking about Mr. Khan's style is how conversational it is. Even on subjects steeped in nerdery (such as his 10-minute explanation of polynomial approximation of functions), he manages to insert humour in his videos.





<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="https://www.youtube.com/v/bC5Lahh4Aus&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="https://www.youtube.com/v/bC5Lahh4Aus&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>


After reaching "the most amazing conclusion in mathematics," he exclaims, "This should blow your mind. If it doesn't, then you have no emotion. I will just judge you."

His fans can't stop singing his praises. There are multiple calls for a Nobel prize on his Facebook page (with more than 13,000 members), and many viewers send him cash donations to support his project.

One of them is Colin Pham, a 19-year-old mechanical engineering student at University of Calgary.

He started watching Mr. Khan's videos during his first year of university when he found himself struggling in his differential equations and calculus courses.

"In lecture, they're about an hour long and after 35 minutes through it, your brain kind of shuts off," he says. He'd struggle to understand his notes when he read them after class.



<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="https://www.youtube.com/v/caDsOVsIbwo&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="https://www.youtube.com/v/caDsOVsIbwo&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>


But Mr. Khan's videos, which he found through a Google search, were refreshingly simple.

"If I'm actually stuck on something, it's easy to rewind and go through it again," he says. Now, after watching a video, he can decode the formal language in his textbook and course notes.

For students ready to dive into YouTube, Prof. Woodruff offers one word of caution: Know how to discriminate between good videos and bad ones.

Like Wikipedia, the democratic nature of the source means it isn't always reliable. Many junior high and high-school students post videos of class projects online, some of which rack up thousands of views.

"Sometimes they're limited in their knowledge of the subject matter, they're sometimes simple, they're sometimes wrong," Prof. Woodruff says. "You really don't know what you're getting when you find something on the Web that way."

Mr. Khan's academic credentials have earned him trust among viewers. While his core audience is made up of high-school and university students, he says some teachers and professors have used his videos too.

But YouTube still remains a largely untapped gold mine for instructors.

"Teachers should know that their kids are doing this - that this is a major supplement to the text," James Slotta, an associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, says. "If teachers engaged with this, it's going to get even better."















Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe