 In this video, we'll spend some time looking at the background of what everybody should know about instructional video that I think will make it easier to place the videos we're creating in the right context. So what should everybody know? Well, let's start with a bit of a puzzle. I'll show you a quote and think about what year is that quote from? And also who said it? So the quote goes like this, books will soon be obsolete in the public schools. Scholars will be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed inside of 10 years. And we have been working for some time on the school pictures and it proves conclusively the worth of motion pictures in chemistry, physics, and other branches of study, making the scientific truth difficult to understand from textbooks plain and clear to children. So this quote is from 1913. This quote is by Thomas Edison, who gave that when he was interviewed about the future of the motion picture and education, back that motion picture now, a video. But what happened? If you add 10 years to 1913, you certainly know that didn't happen. The education system wasn't transformed. And if you look at the history of education and videos, you'll see that that hasn't happened for many decades until quite recently. So in the 1940s and 60s, there was a lot of public information films, children's programming on television. In the 70s, it was open university, educational videos on TV. In the U.S., it was a schoolhouse rock. In the 1980s, there was a big hope around VCR and laser discs changing the face of education. And then again, that same hope was put into the CD-ROMs in the 1990s. But none of these things have actually made videos integral to learning. It was always a secondary source of information, secondary ways of approaching the material and for instructors to interact with their students. But now I think we are in a different state. But let's first think about what are some of the specifics of videos that have made it so difficult for video to actually make much headway into education. There are I think three areas in which we need to pay attention. So there's a consumption of videos, a production, and distribution. So in terms of consumption, I think we have to remember that video is a very linear medium, which means the navigation can be somewhat difficult, that there's no easy way to skim or scan a video. Skipping is also not that easy. It's very much bound to the equipment that the video is being transmitted over. And headway often is bound to a particular place. So if you compare that to a book, that is very different. A book you can take anywhere with you. It's just a book. A book doesn't need any additional equipment. And it's very easy to skim, scan, skip around, and so on. And of course, unlike a book, videos are also much more difficult to produce. It's very expensive to do it. You can't just have one person doing it. You generally need more than one person a team. Once you've produced it, it's very difficult to modify. And it ages quite quickly. And it's not just the content. It's also the people, hairstyles, clothing, and so on. So videos are often go out of style. And then if you want to modify that, you pretty much have to record a new video. Whereas with a book, if you want to republish an old text, you simply publish it again, maybe add some new pictures, a more modern layout. And with very little expense, relatively, you have been able to update an old text with a video that is not possible. And of course, even with all of these things, if you solve them, they still have the issue of delivery. With delivery, there's the issue of media compatibility. There's also the cost that has to do with bandwidth and requirements. In the old days, it was postal requirements, file size, and so on. So these are all the things that were always a problem with video. And of course, if you take that into the school environment, then that's even more difficult. So if many people remember the video equipment, TVs, and VCO has been rolled into classrooms, and then it always took up a lot more time. And so it really had to be worth the teacher's time to use a video in a classroom. And that also has, I think, held back video as a medium education. But as I indicated, right now, I think things are changing. Where I would say that we're actually in the middle of a video revolution in education. And what is behind that revolution? Well, it's very clearly YouTube. YouTube has made a tremendous difference in the way video has permeated the world of learning and education. And so what are the components of this revolution? Well, first, the ease of production. So we talked about how difficult production is. And that, of course, has changed a lot. And YouTube didn't introduce these means of production, but it actually stimulated a lot more development in those areas. So there's a lot of cheap technology. A lot of people have developed skills by creating these videos. So it's no longer have to be a film expert to create videos. And also it's much easier to update videos to create new ones. And as all this has been going on, there's a new language of video has developed. So people are now exploring different ways of communicating through video rather than just the old ways of what we're used to seeing from on TV and on film. But what YouTube has also done now that we've produced the video is increase the ease of distribution. So, of course, all of the video is now distributed online. And it's very cheap, sometimes completely free, and both for the distributors and for the consumers. And it is very mobile. So you're no longer tied to one place. So all of a sudden, video is much more like a book used to be. You can take it with you anywhere, even though there are still some technical requirements. And that has all contributed to increase in the ease of consumption. So videos are now often freeze with captions. It's a lot easier to add additional ways of interacting with the content. People can increase the speed of playback and then listen at the higher speed to get more of the videos more quickly. It's easier to navigate because, of course, all of it is done on a mobile device. You can easily swipe around with a finger. You can put bookmarks in and things like that. And also, you can also combine short videos into bigger holes. That's something, for example, that Linda is doing. And this revolution, I think, has brought some consequences that are also worth exploring. So first, there are a lot of new pedagogies that have developed as a result of the sort of increased ease of producing, consuming, and distributing videos. So MOOCs are perhaps one of the bigger phenomena of recent years, which pretty much is using the opportunity of creating relatively cheap videos and putting them as online courses that are then available to a large number of people. But also, even within the classroom, this new pedagogy has developed. It's called the FLIP classroom, where the teacher prepares videos ahead of time with the content, and then during the classroom, just focused on practice. And actually, that's what I'm doing right now. So I'm creating this video for people to watch before the workshop, and then we don't have to waste time on explaining what the FLIP classroom is and what these things are during the workshop. And then just focus on how to make the most out of the materials that we want to develop and how to get some practice in. There's also a huge growth in informal learning. Everybody has learned something on YouTube, whether it's being how to fix a washing machine or how to do math, how to play the piano, how to improve their learning of calculus. And that can all happen outside the school in many, many areas. And of course, there are also other things that are happening in the schools, such as capturing lectures that can then be replayed to students and so on. Now, of course, there are many new platforms. And the most obvious is YouTube, but there's also Vimeo. So there are many more ways of sharing the videos. There are other bandwidth providers who can even help you distribute the videos yourself if you don't want to use YouTube or Vimeo. There are many providers for lecture capture. And also, I think the biggest platform really that has grown alongside video is that they mutually enable each other's smartphones or both grade video consumption devices, but also video production devices. And all of this has contributed to the growth of new institutions in the broadest possible sense. So I think YouTube channels are sorts of institutions on YouTube. Anybody can start a channel and start posting videos on an educational topic. And many people have done that, and we'll have a look at some of them. And one of them is Khan Academy, which was started off as just a YouTube channel. And now it's a big nonprofit that has hundreds, maybe even thousands of videos on different topics that hundreds of thousands of millions of people have learned from, including myself. There are many video providers now that provide commercial videos or paid for videos, like lynda.com, which was sold from billions to LinkedIn, which is now part of Microsoft. There's Udemy, a competitor to Linda, Skillshare, and so on. There are many opportunities for people to both share the videos they made and also learn from people who made videos. There are many platforms where people can share their courses, like Edex or Coursera, or Future Learn in the UK, the MOOC providers that again provide probably by now thousands of courses that people can learn from on those courses that are usually built around video. There is the Great Courses platform, which started in the 1990s as an audio lecture provider, but it has now branched out into videos, and again, there are many videos that you can subscribe to and watch whole, entirely, university courses. And there's a recent entry into this market called Masterclass that does really highly produced video courses from some of the top people in their profession, be it their musicians, film directors, sports people, and so on. So that just kind of shows us that we're in a new space when it comes to instructional video. And then in the next video, we're going to have a look at different formats of instructional videos and what are some of the options for us out there.