Online Learning – Alternatives to YouTube

Online Learning – Alternatives to YouTube

Byrichard

Between adverts that play too often, videos that encourage people tho shift to the Right side of the political spectrum and sensationalism I decided to stop using YouTube. I have spent two months without YouTube. I use alternative video platforms. I use Udemy, Prime Video, Linkedin Learning, Vimeo and other platforms.


I stopped using YouTube because it went from being a video sharing platform for individuals to being a broadcast platform where algorithms force some types of content rather than others. I saw an increasing amount of sensationalist headlines and video titles and grew tired of them. I was tired of having to filter out the emotional politically slanted content from worthwhile content. I had to spend more time reporting and ignoring content designed to make me angry or emotional. Clickbait was another challenge to overcome.


YouTube, although relied on by plenty of people to share video content, has become toxic. Take a look at video tutorial websites, Vimeo and other video distribution platforms and you will see how stark the contrast is. Add to this the flood of video adverts and you have a service that becomes unusable. Sometimes I had two to five minute videos as pre-roll before a two minute video of content I wanted to watch.


YouTube then asks for 20 CHF or more per month for the same content, without adverts. 240 CHF per year, for user generated content. That is far too expensive, especially when they de-monetised content from normal video content producers with small audiences, and low viewing hours.


Within the last month I did return to YouTube, but between the sensationalist headlines, and the pre-roll adverts I found that the cost of use became too high. They have made it so that you can no longer browse for content without eventually giving up and watching what the algorithms think you should watch. This is unhealthy. This is dangerous because of how it can polarise people who have not made up their minds about moral, or other issues.


I bring this up today because I saw that someone said that YouTube is a great school for developers but I do not believe that it is. I do not believe that it is because it is exploitative of content creators. Content creators need to invest hundreds of hours in creating content, sensationalising it to appeal to the algorithms, and then get thousands of minutes of viewing time before they can monetise it.


I believe that Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, Coursera and other platforms are more interesting for makers of tutorial and learning videos because you can charge people for content. You can provide them with certificates of completion and you can split courses into units and chapters. You can also include files and test them on what they have learned, and get them to revise, if they fail.


Linkedin Learning


One of the strengths of Linkedin Learning is that it is bound to your company or NGO e-mail account so you can study for free, via the company that you are working for. When you complete courses your skills are highlighted in your Linkedin Profile, as are your certificates. This is useful to show that you are an active learner.


Coursera


I used Coursera for the Google IT Support course, and although the course is 28 USD per month until you complete the course, it is a great learning platform because it integrates with online learning solutions that force you to learn in a practical manner. You have to setup and take down servers, you have to create and remove directories, show that you understand binary, network topologies and more. You also take quizzes and if you fail you need to revise for an hour before you can try again. If you fail again you need to wait 24hours or more before retaking a test. You learn by practicing, and by reviewing. You can give up, but as long as you are motivated you can pass the course. I like their system.


Udemy


Udemy is more like Linkedin Learning except that rather than pay per month or per year, you pay per course. The courses are often 200 or more dollars a piece, but they often have promotions where you can get courses for 12 USD or less. This means that if you’re attentive you can get three or four courses for the price of an Entrecote in a swiss restaurant. There is no time limit on these courses, so you are not forced to do every course within a month or year, of purchasing a course.


And Finally


Learning is a process. Splitting it into manageable pieces is important. Being clear of distractions is also important. To learn we need to be active, through listening to instructions, and then checking that we have understood what we are doing, and then moving on to the next part. With Udemy, Coursera and Linkedin we can do this easily, and at the end of it we have a certificate of completion. In some cases it is automatically added to our Linkedin profile.


With YouTube we are flooded with distractions, we are forced to filter through the irrelevant before we come to the relevant, and in many cases tutorials are several hours long. I prefer to learn via platforms where the instructors are forced to be systematic about the courses they provide. If YouTube wants to be a serious contender in the Online learning environment then it should create a new product, YouTube learning, and provide relevant features, to formalise what, for now is a chaotic system.


I realise that people like to watch five to ten minute videos explaining how to do something specific, via YouTube. For me though, YouTube is too chaotic. I prefer to find a written explanation.

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Video Editing And Social Media

Byrichard

In the past if you wanted to be a video editor you also needed to be a camera operator, and to be a camera operator you needed to be a video editor. By knowing both skills you shot good material because you knew how hard bad material was to use. As a result of this videos were worth watching with all of our attention.


In recent years, there has been a move towards multimedia editing, where you don’t expect people to watch the video while sitting in front of a TV. You expect them to be looking at a mobile phone while commuting, or scrolling through a social media feed. Job offers reflect this. You often see jobs that required perfect spelling and grammar, Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects. The need for an editor to be a camera operator is gone. We have gone from videos being made by camera operators and video editors who love their medium, to graphists, who overlay graphics over video. They’re making slideshows, rather than video content.


Today I started to watch a video about desertification and the graphics were so huge and prominent that I lost interest after just two shots. They are not using video appropriately. Videos should not be optimised for social media. They should be made interesting to view.


I spend hours a week watching videos on YouTube where the use of graphics is minimal or even non-existent. I watch hiking and camping documentaries that are half an hour to an hour long with minimal music and minimal graphics.


For a long time, there was the notion that content should be 1 to three minutes long for people to watch the entire thing. I think that this view is now wrong. I believe that with the coming of age of YouTube content creators, so the desire for longer form content has grown.


Tik Tok and User Generated Spam


For a while I really liked TikTok during this pandemic and then I fell out of love with it for two reasons. The first of these reasons is that it forces you onto the For You Page so you end up watching and following strangers, whom you will never interact with and the second is that everyone uses the same song, does the same action, but in their own individual way. This could be seen as fun, and many do, but for me this is User Generated Spam.


Over a decade ago we had Qik, We had Seesmic, we had Livestation and plenty of other video sharing apps, some of them live, others pre-recorded, and others for multi-camera streaming. TikTok had great potential to be a Seesmic style channel. We could have logged in, recorded a video, and had someone comment or respond. It could have been a way of conversing people with our voices. Instead, it is a talent show. There is little to no engagement. We don’t talk. We don’t get to know others. Furthermore, we’re just eyeballs looking at mediocre content, when we could do something more interesting.


I considered unfollowing plenty of accounts, but this takes time. I also considered that I could follow accounts that create original content. Paradoxically, TikTok gave me just the video to illustrate the point I am making. 😉


@bmcdiving

Been a Long Week Of Diving In This Beautiful WasteWater ??? #commercialdiving #underwaterwelder #wastewater #shitjob #livingthedream

? Astronaut In The Ocean – Masked Wolf

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7000 youtube views

Byrichard

Over the past month I have seen an increase of 7000 views in relation to the videos I have posted on youtube. The two events that helped make this a reality are the Geneva Lake Parade and the Paleo Festival. For the Paleo Festival scantily clad girls were an attractive proposition.

As to the paleo it was taking video I had streamed live on qik and sharing it via a number of video sharing websites of which youtube was one.

To give an idea of the audience peaks we saw over 900 views for the Lake Parade footage and over 1300 views for Manu Chao. That’s a respectable audience.

The question is whether there are any events you would like me to cover (via live streaming from a mobile phone) and whether that would attract a big enough audience.

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Over 16,000 views on youtube

Byrichard

In the space of two weeks I have gone from having just 11,000 views on my youtube channel to over 16,000, thanks mostly to videos I shot with the phone. I went to film the Geneva Lake Parade and then the Paleo. The Lake Parade generated several thousand views and already I’ve had over four hundred views to the Paleo Manu Chao and Tiken Jah… can’t remember the name.

It’s not bad and it demonstrates the trend that I think is interesting. Go out and film, put it online with the right keywords and watch as people flock to see the content that you have offered them. Of course this is just an experiment but it’s increased my visibility quite a bit. I’ll wait to see how long it takes to get to twenty thousand views and more.

What are the next events I could cover in Switerland?

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2600% jump in views, 650 views in just one day.

Byrichard

That’s fun 🙂

Thanks to the Geneva Lake Parade I saw a nice jump in traffic to the twelve videos or so I streamed and uploaded yesterday. I suppose when you cover the right event there is an audience. This is just one small example of why I should continue streaming video content.

That’s also why I should get the content on a number of platforms.

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The youtube application on the N95

Byrichard

For those of you with good data packages an application that could be a lot of fun is youtube on the n95. I was out and about and decided to check the youtube site and I was given the option to download their beta. I managed to play vides but I had no sound.

What they offer are:

  • upload your videos from the phone

  • watch your friends’ videos

  • view relatd videos

  • view received videos

  • search for content.

In other words you can do everything you’d want to from the n95 that you’d do from a computer. It does look like an interesting application although unless you’ve got wifi this is a very expensive gimmick. It’s nice to try nonetheless. Let me know if you try it and tell me what you think of it.

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Why Audiovisual Content That’s Not On-Demand is Dead to Me

Byrichard

I’m online from 10-15hrs  a day on average and as a result I’m used to having everything available within a short amount of time. I also had access to a PVR with a hard disk upgrade for quite a long time. As a result of both these developments anything that is not available to me when I want to watch it goes unnoticed. That’s because “It’s an on-demand world” as was concluded in one edit I worked on for a client about the future of broadcasting.


From a young age I had quite a choice of channels. Some were French, some were Italian and others were German. That’s because it’s Geneva and you get the French tv channels as well as the Swiss national channels. That’s access to about 7 channels over the air in analog form. With Sky digital the number of channels increased from 10-30 and finally to several thousand. Recently Sky started to broadcast a greater range of international content.


The next move was the PVR. The ability to record up to three hundred hours of program content to disk from two receivers at once. If you allow for a backlog to develop then you’ve got a fake video on demand on service. That’s great. It means that when you know which programs you want to watch the machine will take care of it.


A cheap version of this is available online through platforms such as Itunes where it’s powered by RSS feeds. At the beginning you’ve got very little content as you learn more about the technology but over time you end up with over four hundred podcasts in the back catalog. That’s quite a bit of choice.


Youtube, Revver, Myspace, Dailymotion are true video-on-demand services in browser form. Each of these websites allows you to download and watch thousands of short video clips without a dedicated time. That’s great. A housemate wanted to watch some comedy so we went to youtube, downloaded, and watched a selection of programs on demand.


Of course, the next step is Joost like platforms. It’s like a television channel but you can select when it’s convenient to watch the program rather than setting your life around the program.


There are two reasons for this. The first is an increase in capacity. The second is progress in technology.  We went from having four channels to 10 times that number with Freeview and with satellite broadcasting we’ve gone from 20 channels to several thousand. We’ve also gone from one user interface, the television set with five channels to the computer, and unlimited choice. That’s why media content that is not on-demand is almost dead to me.

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Over 400 views of the Sandstorm video

Byrichard

I’ve just checked the number of hits on the Silent disco hits and it’s now up to over four hundred views. That’s a nice amount. I’m quite happy with this number because it’s from my website rather than another source.

I’ve been posting videos on the web for many years and I’ve seen many projects start and fail and others expand. It used to be that websites would have just 5 megabytes and websites would be html based. We’re in web 2.0 now and it’s normal for me to download over a gig of data per day when I’m at home.

Some people say that video on the web is going to cause problems, that there are bottle necks and that’s it’s not built for live video. That’s because they’re new to the web and think they’re gurus after just two years of daily use. I remember when it was the 56k modems and use was paid per minute. I remember when short text pages would take a while to load.

I remember when chatrooms did not require you to create a profile which everyone could see. Where everything was fleeting, as bars are. You’d see hundreds of people but you had to converse with them. ASL used to be a popular question

Today there’s no need. Just click on the username and you find out everything about them that they want you to know, age, sex location, websites, groups they like and more.

For the past few weeks I’ve become really familiar with facebook and how powerfull a tool it is. I love it. It’s great because when you’re out meeting people you often get to meet up to 20 people in one night sometimes and there’s no way you’re going to remember them. Ragweek is an example of them. Too many faces. Not enough personal detail for the name to stick in my mind. Facebook means that I go online and I can review the night, see pictures of new friends and learn a little more about them.

When I was at the silent disco there are a few people I notice in quite a few shots and by posting pictures online they’ve presented their identity. They are no longer nameless faces that shall remain irrelevant to my life. They seek each other out and tag themselves in video frames I’ve posted. In so doing their friends can see them.

They enjoy it. It’s not a stalker medium. it’s about the McLuhanist global village. It’s about the extension and enhancment of social interaction. I was doing some research for an essay about technological determinism yesterday which explains the use of such terms.

When McLuhan talked about the medium as the message he talked about the media as a thing which acts as an extension. Imagine you go out and meet someone and you get their name and phone number. The phone number is great because you can talk to them live with no difficulty. A facebook account is greater because it allows you to understand their personality, their likes and dislikes and more. It’s a way for people to embelish on spontaneous meetings.

It’s the global village that McLuhanits have examined and studied. Since everyone knows everyone else facebook is the village taverna. It’s where you speak to your friends about other friends and a community forms. If you interact with enough groups then that village, that medium (facebook) becomes a family. There is nothing sinister about it for the simple reason that you do not remain anonymous. Everyone whose interest you have summoned will be able to feed their curiosity and the next time they go to an event they will invite you.

I love it.

When I was living in a small village in Switzerland I was afraid that technology was a great isolationist tool but that view has changed. What is isolationist about going online and sharing your interests with others. i created one group and 56 people became members. Those members are all fans of the Paleo Festival.

Events are shared and talked about. I may not spend every day around those at King’s but this does not mean that I have not been invited to their events. I was invited in person to the clavicle challenge but did not participate. I’ve been invited to parties via sms, bulletins on myspace and event notifications on Facebook. People invite other friends and you’ll see how many people are planning on going and next time you meet them you’ll be able to discuss that.

In other cases, as with the silent disco I was able to see an event and participate. Once the event was over I was able to share the content with many people. They come, they participate. They take pictures and upload them. I upload some as well. The event was only an hour long but the bond formed through the event is enhanced and perpetuated through Facebook.

There is a night at the SU bar tonight involving tequilla shots. Many people will meet but how many friendships will last beyond a night. There’s one girl who I chatted to at the beginning of the year but now she doesn’t recognise me. Similar things happen every year and it’s tiring.

Facebook has become the new social hub. I see how everyone is doing and they see how I’m doing. They post pictures and I’m reminded of how much fun was had at those events. It’s perpetual, a cycle of positive feedback.

Does technology determin how people interact? Yes because it helps them get to where they want to get and affects the comfort level but no because human nature is human. In other words the fundamental principles remain the same although the means by which certain things are done affects the interaction.

Why study the media? Because by studying the media you are studying communication between individuals, whether it’s the type of chair they’re sitting on or the type of alcohol they’re drinking. It encompasses our daily lives to such an extent that it’s considered a mickey mouse course. Why spend 30hrs in a library reading books that were written thirty years ago when the media changes at the speed of thought. I’ve seen the media landscape change so much within the past 10 years that every day I form new opinions and philosophies about communication.

Media studies are within every book about film, every photograph, every song, every bag. We’re saturated by the media around us therefore we discredit those who study the media. I don’t me we as in I but rather the metaphorical We of society as a whole.

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Why I am happy that youtube is being sued

Byrichard

I am happy that youtube is being sued because out of the hundreds of video sharing websites out there it is the most devious. It has taken hundreds of hours of content produced at great expense by teams of professionals and offered them in poor quality for nothing on their site. To make it worse it’s made them billions of dollars.

How can the mega corporations, through the intermediary of the RIAA give so much trouble to those who share music let allow youtube to thrive. It doesn’t make sense.

What about all those video sharing websites that went about making content and distributing it the right way? What about those who decided that they would provide a service at no cost to themselves. I’m speaking of those guilty of unlawful distribution of video material.

It’s a website about deception, look at lonelygirl, look at the coke and mentos adverts. Look at the ball in groin laughter. It’s all a form of sadistic pleasure. Why would you want to be manipulated in such a way.

On the positive side it was fun to see the world cup celebrations and I uploaded some video of my own in response to other people’s content.

When it’s used as a video version of flickr it’s an excellent website because it’s an audiovisual window onto the world where a vast wealth of video content may be accessed. Good snowboarding, post it, good party, post it, personal work you’re proud of, post it.

Everyone of us is a content producer and distributor and everyone of us is challenging himself to create something that other people will enjoy. Geocities was about websies, the original sixdegrees was inspired by the film to show that everyone is related throough less than six people to everyone else. Blogging allowed people to reount their lives to anonymous audiences, flickr allowed the sharing of instants and video sharing websites allowed for the sharing of moments.

Is it voyeuristic to look at online videos and photographs made by friends and random strangers and is it exhibitionist of them to show that content? Is it wrong to look at it?

I would participate in this more actively were it not for the droit d’image. I don’t want others posting pictures of me without my consent and I won’t post pictures of others without their consent.

Doesn’t mean I won’t keep looking. It’s fun to constantly refresh the most recent pictures on flickr and see all the events that have been taking place around the world.