Google Launches YouTube Edu

I recently wrote YouTube University – An Interesting Opportunity for Innovative Students and Teachers. Well now this idea is getting a boost as recently reported in the Wall Street Journal's story YouTube Edu Launches. From the story:

"YouTube launched a new section of its site Thursday that organizes the video channels of more than 100 colleges and universities.

The section, called YouTube Edu, is the result of about a year’s work on the part of Google employees using their 20% time for outside projects, said Obadiah Greenberg, a partner manager at YouTube. Several of the search giant’s products and services, including Google News and its social-networking site Orkut, had a similar start."

The popular educational blog ReadWriteWeb said this:

This is a great idea and we expect that young people who discover it will appreciate it. At first glance it looks better to us than iTunes University. This could genuinely help young people make more informed decisions about what schools to apply to. There's also a lot of great content on the site for anyone to learn from. If you like academic videos, make sure to check out Academic Earth as well.

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Note to pre-k to 12 educators. Youtube has mixed the edu content in with the rest of the site – no separate URL, no dedicated directory. This makes it impossible for school systems like the NYC DOE to unfilter just the edu content. This may be an intentional strategy on the part of Youtube to try to get the whole site unblocked rather than provide a separate, dedicated space for instructional content. As a result it will be difficult for schools to take advantage of this resource across a school. Innovative educators may be able to come up with creative workarounds such as computers that are on an unfiltered line specifically for these students who would be monitored, or this can be an afterschool option for some students like the one in my post YouTube University – An Interesting Opportunity for Innovative Students and Teachers.

To read ideas on how this site can impact education visit the discussion at Youtube EDU.