YouTube.edu

Many faculty, as well as the rest of the world, have been using Youtube for a variety of purposes, including even a few instructional! One of the major advantages of Youtube is it's ease of use and the ability to embed videos in other webpages or, in the case of distance education, course shells. The process of uploading and embedding a video is so easy that it is extremely popular with instructors who are using existing content or creating short video content. The only problem with regular Youtube accounts is that videos are limited to 10 minutes.  For some instructional uses 10 minutes is a sufficient amount of time but for some faculty members it is not enough to accomplish her/his instructional goal. Some would argue, my among them, that most content should be less than 10 minutes but I have also seem some amazingly innovative video that is over that length and truly great!

Youtube has a .edu section of it's service which is devoted to educational resources. A University applies for a .edu account and this brings two big advantages: videos are not limited to 10 minutes and the University has an entire 'site' that can be used to organize the content.

Many Universities that currently have a Youtube.edu account have separate accounts for different entities on campus, with distance education and extension as options. Harvard has a University site as well as 3 other sites, including the 'Harvard Extension School'. UW already has one .edu setup but we hope to be able to add Outreach as well. We are the distance "delivery van" and as such we have unique needs.

I'm planning to apply for an UW Outreach Youtube.edu account. The main purpose of this would be for instructional purposes but once it is up we may find other great possibilities. If we named it Outreach instead of OCP then it could also be used by the other units of the Outreach school and UW/CC, OCP, Marketing, and OTS could all have a channel within the overall Outreach site.

We've got buy in and we're ready to apply and see what happens.