YouToo Can Teach on YouTube: Lessons Learned from Teaching through Online Video
Each of us has a learning preference. Some students insist on attending live lectures, taking notes or just absorbing the teacher’s words. However, modern technological developments may mean that norms are shifting in favor of students learning instead from recorded lectures.
In my personal experience as a university lecturer, I would often deliver a lecture to a half-full theater, answer several questions from the students in attendance and then walk to my next venue. On the way, I would pass a computer-filled library where other students were sitting at terminals listening to my same lecture. It turns out that they liked to be able to pause the lecture, write some detailed notes and carry on learning.
The videos these students were learning from were not always of the highest quality. The university’s recording system recorded thousands of lectures, and occasionally things would go wrong. For example, the document camera would capture video, but the audio would sometimes be missing.
As perhaps 70% of students are learning in such a fashion, surely we can do better to serve their needs.
In December of 2017, I, like some others, became interested in Bitcoin as a novel payment system for freelancers or digital nomads. I was fascinated by what cryptocurrency YouTubers were using and how they were delivering information.
Since these YouTubers were reading online news articles and offering their thoughts on them, many used a green screen behind them whereby software replaced the green with their computer monitor. This made it so that they presented their thoughts in front of their computer showing news and price charts.
After watching enough of these videos, I realized that it might serve as an effective technique for modern teaching. Furthermore, I had the bright idea of teaching Wolfram Mathematica, a mathematical program, in that way.
In December of 2018, after my latest full-time, one-year contract as a lecturer ended, I decided to take a chance on a new model of teaching and research, doing it on YouTube with the hope that one day I could earn income teaching math without having to leave Queensland.
It is said that there may be one billion people on the planet accessing information online. I know that whenever I need to learn something, like how to build a garden shed, YouTube is one of the most efficient ways to do so. It is free to view and has a search engine built into it. That is powerful!
Many individuals in the developing world seek to learn, but university fees can be beyond their budgets. I would like to be able to reach people throughout the world who are interested in learning mathematics and mathematical programming, and my favorite way to do that is through the Wolfram Language, the programming code behind Mathematica.
Instead of reaching 900 students, there is the potential to reach 90,000 or more on YouTube.
What I do on YouTube is give a shorter version of a math lecture — say 20 to 30 minutes — on a search-able topic, e.g. integration by parts. I generally speak aloud while writing out problems in a Mathematica cell, showing all steps of the calculation. Note that this is not yet in the Wolfram Language, as I usually do not execute what I write. Instead, I later put asterisks around what I write (* like so *), turning the problem-solving steps into a comment so that associated calculations can then be run in that same cell. Since Mathematica palettes contain symbols that can be read and understood as mathematics, this approach generally works quite well. It means that all of the graphics and computational tools of the Wolfram Language are at my fingertips to enhance the discussion.
Even now, I feel some anxiety about putting myself out there because we all misspeak, make mistakes and have physical imperfections. However, just consider for a moment the value that someone on the other side of the video may take from that. Surely that is worth it.
To produce my YouTube videos, I have two monitors connected to a desktop PC. I record the monitor that is not covered in icons using the free software OBS Studio. I use a RØDE USB microphone and a Logitech USB webcam, as it records high-quality video. I have an artist’s canvas that is slightly taller than me that I have painted bright green. I place the canvas behind my chair and, with everything configured, start recording my Mathematica lessons.
It helps to plan out lessons in advance. I use a pre-prepared booklet filled with images I once used as posters to remind students about important concepts from each of the first-year university mathematics courses I had taught at the University of Queensland. I produced that booklet in my own time. I have repurposed this booklet to teach mathematics and Mathematica, renaming it “A YouTube Course in Mathematica.” This provides an almost endless supply of content ideas for videos, and without other obligations, I could even produce several per day.
However, I do more than just follow this booklet. I try to capture other search-term traffic via the so-called YouTube algorithm and produce fun videos on doing entertaining things with the Wolfram Language, such as modeling the price of gold with least squares and signal processing; editing music, files and photographs; and even fooling around with random words and poetry.
I remarked earlier that I am trying a new approach to teaching and research. From the time I started my PhD in math, I only wanted to be a mathematics researcher. However, it seems that I took teaching too seriously and was given an enormous amount of teaching work, which inevitably slowed down my ability to make research contributions. I would love to be able to do both teaching and research, and with the possibility of reaching thousands of students with evergreen content, I feel I may eventually be able to sustain both activities.
If you are a teacher, a lecturer or a researcher, or even a combination of all three, then I invite you to try this out too. Perhaps you will one day master the technique, edit in the appropriate humor and make this dream a success. There is not much to lose and so many people you can help.
About the blogger:
Samuel Hambleton
Sam wants to earn an honest living working with mathematics. Having been excluded from his university studies in Queensland, Australia, early on due to poor grades, he returned home to California to work for his family maintaining logging roads and building bridges around the Sequoia and Yosemite parks. Sam learned about the merits of hard work and resumed his studies in Queensland, receiving a first-class honors degree in mathematics.
Despite being initially knocked back, he persisted, starting a Master of Philosophy degree in Number Theory while working for a $2 shop. He spent nearly a month preparing an oral presentation for his degree, but after it was well-received, he was subsequently awarded an internal Ph.D. scholarship by the University of Queensland and offered teaching work in Numerical Analysis. Because of his fears of public speaking, Sam took this teaching work very seriously and eventually learned to be an effective communicator. He learned to appreciate the difficulties and challenges that students face in learning math and feels that the fees that students pay should not be taken for granted.
Sam discovered Mathematica in his first year of university studies, where it helped him maintain his interest in mathematics and overcome his limitations. Sam wants to share the power of Mathematica with as many people as he can reach. He has started a YouTube channel devoted to teaching mathematics courses together with Mathematica in order to contribute to students’ learning and to eventually build a consistent income. He has ten years of lecturing experience and three consecutive years of full-time teaching experience and has jointly authored a 500-page book with H. C. Williams called Cubic Fields with Geometry. Although not currently lecturing, Sam hopes to persist with his first love, mathematical research enhanced by Wolfram technologies. He can be found on LinkedIn and reached via e-mail.
