YouTube – The Story of How It Got From Entertainment to Education

Youtube started in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, two former PayPal employees, as an easy platform for users to post videos. With the first YouTube video, Me at the Zoo, featuring Jawed Karim, the co-founder, talking about elephants, anyone could put a clip in front of an international audience. YouTube was quickly popular enough that Google bought it for $1.65 billion in 2006 and became a media empire.

 Over time, YouTube’s videos grew from just for fun to cover

all manner of topics: tutorials, recipes, games and vlogs. Importantly, YouTube itself had democratised education, and the big names such as Khan Academy, TED-Ed and CrashCourse provide free high-quality content on maths, science and history. New functions such as playlists and playback speed controls also enabled learn-at-your-own-speed. By the time of COVID-19 1.3 billion students lost traditional schooling, YouTube was already the education hub of the world for students and lifelong learners, with millions of students all over the world having access to affordable learning. YouTube is now not only a major entertainment medium but also a massive source of information for anyone with an internet connection.

My Journey with YouTube and Online Learning

Life was forever transformed by COVID-19. I was studying  in 11 grade,  and I had the biggest year of preparation for school. And then school closed, and study    was online. First it was a nice departure from the school schedule – no early mornings, no long rides, just accessing online from home for lessons. But over the next several months, the giddiness died down and online learning became a struggle.

Working from home was not without its hiccups. And I was in the midst of stuff I never would have found in a classroom. My biggest distraction was my smartphone, the thing you had to study.

 A single notification and I would be looking on social media or talking to my friends rather than my professor. ‘I would come back later,’ I kept telling myself, because I knew the exams would be on the internet, something.

But by year’s end, I found that tests would be offline – in person. That announcement hit me hard.  I was taking classes on the web, and I couldn’t hear them enough, so all of a sudden, I had questions. I had no idea a lot of what we’d talked about, and I was so short on time. I was panicking thinking failure would be inescapable.

And so, I looked to YouTube. I had always used YouTube