Background During the COVID-19 lockdowns in South Africa, undergraduate in-person laboratory sessions were prohibited. In turn, video-based tutorials were proposed as a temporary solution to address the lack of in-person practical demonstration sessions. Many educators uploaded their content to the university’s teaching and learning platform. Last semester, I asked a colleague if I could use his class time for one of my assessments; he advised me that it was not a problem as his students “have the videos” so they can watch them anytime. This meant this lecturer was fine with his videos used in place of his in-person teaching. My next question was how good are these videos? Have they been reviewed? Do they have thousands of views on YouTube and thousands of likes or thumbs up? Are his videos on Udemy 3 being offered as part of a short course? Unfortunately, the answer was no to all these questions; the videos are only on the university’s Ulink (Blackboard) platform and owing to the pandemic, this seems to be an acceptable form of teaching. This is not an isolated case. The reliance on videos in place of teaching concerned me as such videos are unreviewed and there are no internal metrics to verify the quality and impact of these videos. Blackboard, for example, does not provide adequate metrics to measure the videos in terms of the usage and impact, that is, there are insufficient analytics for the educator to evaluate their videos. There are also no in-house university regulations regarding quality control for videos provided for students. Social media platforms have become popular platforms to publish videos and the most popular platform is YouTube. It is estimated that in 2022, almost five billion views take place each day on this platform, making YouTube the largest media sharing platform (Arthurs, Drakopoulou & Gandini 2018) and the second largest social media network 4. One of YouTube’s features is its extensive analytics—providing educators with at least 60 different metrics to measure the usage of each video posted on the platform (Baron 2022). 3 Udemy is an online platform for massive open online courses (MOOC) aimed at professional adults and students. 4 https://www.statista.com; https://fortunelords.com/youtube-statistics/ Introducing YouTube’s social media analytics to educators YouTube tracks user activity across the platform. For example, when a user attempts to watch a video on YouTube, data points are created across several categories. YouTube tracks user behaviour to determine the quality signals for videos across the entire platform, while also learning topic frequencies from user feedback (Bendersky et.al. 2014). Video quality signals assist YouTube in ranking and recommending videos. Video quality signals are created irrespective of whether the user performs explicit or implicit actions. Explicit actions include liking or disliking a video, sharing a video, or commenting on a video. Implicit actions include the user’s demographics (age, location, gender), viewing history, hovering over thumbnails, among other activities. Users also implicitly show their interest in a video by how long they stay tuned to that video—measured as a percentage of the video that is viewed (higher percentage indicates more interest in the video). When the aggregated The reliance on videos in place of teaching concerned me as such videos are unreviewed and there are no internal metrics to verify the quality and impact of these videos. Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching Innovation Projects 2022 7
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