Do You YouTube? The Power of Brief Educational Videos for Extension

Abstract

The growth of online video provides a tremendous opportunity for Extension professionals to expand the reach of educational content. Through repurposing existing content, we at the University of Minnesota Extension Children, Youth, and Family Consortium created several brief educational videos that address pressing challenges for children and families. YouTube analytics indicate that our shorter videos are more often viewed, shared, and liked by our viewers than our full-length seminar videos are. Since we began creating these videos, we have doubled our number of YouTube channel subscribers and likes and increased our video view count over 180%. Online video is a promising way for Extension professionals to extend their reach to a global audience.

Comparing educational and dissemination videos in a STEM YouTube channel: A six-year data analysis

“…Additionally, this study confirms the significant correlation between awareness metrics and interaction metrics, meaning that impressions, views, and subscribers metrics are correlated with comments, shares, likes and dislikes. This is consistent with the common consensus in literature [ 43 , [57] , [58] , [59] ].…”