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Learning design

YouTube for e-learning

It would be difficult to find someone these days who is not aware of YouTube, and most will have wasted an hour / day / insert your own figure here! Viewing cat movies and the like. YouTube is without doubt the go to location for video content (unless you are in China, North Korea, or another country that blocks it).

Over the years YouTube has added more features, including the ability to Like movies, or not. Many movies also allow you to add comments, and read others.

There are thousands of YouTube channels that represent real learning opportunities, providing foreign language learning, kids science lessons, learning to play a musical instrument, and pretty much anything else you can think of. You can almost certainly find something on YouTube that represents ready-made content for enhancing or expanding your online course.

YouTube is perfect for material that can be watched passively, but it doesn’t have functions for interactivity such as questions, which is where applications such as H5P have a huge advantage. With Moodle or some other LMS’s you might combine the power of YouTube to host the movie, H5P to play the movie with some level of interactivity, and Moodle as the container, with related resources and activities before and after the movie. Perfect.

If you are a commercial course provider you might consider adding a few free lessons and movies to attract potential paying customers to your paid courses. You can also just give away old content for free as low level promotion …. why not?!

Moodle make it very easy to embed YouTube videos in your course and it’s filter system will recognise and display these with its inbuilt player.

If you are creating your own content, one feature that many teaches miss is the ability to set YouTube movies to private, so the world cannot see them, but you can still link to them from your courses. We do this with our own online www.moodlebites.com courses – and set many as available to the public:

https://m.youtube.com/user/HRDNZMoodlePartner

Stuart Mealor
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Stuart Mealor

Stuart is interested in all things e-learning, with specific interests in Moodle, e-learning strategy, and business development. His experience in education over 30 years, MBA in International Business, and knowledge of e-learning systems implementation, together with graphic design background, give him a unique skill set for e-learning projects.

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