Earlier this week, YouTube announced plans to spend $20 million on beefing up educational content on its video platform. It’s a major investment that will support the creation of learning-focused content by trusted YouTubers as well as a dedicated channel called Learning. YouTube Learning will feature everything from technical skills training to general curiosity explainers.

First announced in July of 2018 in a mid-year update on the YouTube Creators blog, YouTube Learning is at the center of the platform’s focus on learning and education:

“Education is one of the greatest benefits of YouTube. Everyday, people watch learning-related content over a billion times and they’re using it to develop new skills and encourage their passions. I’m proud to announce a new initiative, YouTube Learning, through which we’re providing grants and promotion to support education focused creator content, expert organizations and learners. We’re also expanding our learning content team efforts and have a newly dedicated product and engineering team working on building out features for learning on YouTube. Our hope is to support those who use YouTube to share their knowledge with the world and the millions of users who come to our platform to learn.”

Malik Ducard, YouTube’s global head of learning, explained the real motivation behind the company’s increased support for high-quality learning content in an interview with the BBC. “The ‘edutubers’ have shown us the power of positivity and the potential of what YouTube can be in education. In 2017, there were over a billion hours [watched] of just videos with ‘how-to’ in the title,” said Ducard.

Entertainment vs. Education

YouTube knows its roots. An entire generation has grown up searching YouTube not just to be entertained, but more often than not to learn something new in a flash. Yet while educators are mostly in agreement when it comes to the value of video-based learning, many also remain skeptical of the quality of YouTube’s video learning content.

Professor Rose Luckin, from UCL’s Institute of Education, told Wired UK, “There are clear educational benefits to be gained by using technology and the internet, however, the drawbacks are just as clear. YouTube, like other online providers of content specifically for young people, would need to be able to guarantee that viewers were being protected.”

That protection, according to Luckin, includes everything from the accuracy of learning content to personal viewer data collected by YouTube.

The Best YouTube For Learning Might Just Be Your Own

While YouTube’s crowd-sourced educational content has helped ignite a revolution in personalized, video-based learning over the last decade, YouTube Learning doesn’t appear to be poised to replace or even supplement the ever-growing video libraries that already exist at most leading universities and top learning enterprises.

Thanks to video recording software and apps that have made it easier and easier for educators and subject matter experts to record lectures, tutorials, and other knowledge in video formats, most organizations already have a far more relevant and reliable collection of informational videos. The only problem is that without a central library for them, these videos can sometimes be difficult to find, share, or even play. In those cases, what organizations are missing is a secure YouTube alternative that makes the answers stored in your videos easy to find.

That internal YouTube alternative is called a video content management system (video CMS), and with one, you can easily build your own video learning library — full of far more pertinent and trustworthy content, and without spending $20 million of your own budget.

How A Video CMS Supports Learning

Without a video content management solution, videos can lose their value simply because people don’t know they exist.

All too often, an institution’s valuable video content is buried within network folders, scattered across file sharing sites, or stuck in systems like an LMS or a CMS, where they aren’t always easy to find and playback can be challenging.

And as your organization creates more educational videos, even storage and sharing solutions for your video content that may be working relatively well now can begin to break down at scale. Here are just a few ways that a video CMS enables you to create your own reliable internal YouTube to support video-based learning for your entire organization:

Host all your learning videos in one centralized library

With a video CMS, you can upload all of your educational video content to one secure, centralized location, just like you would to YouTube — only you control the content and who can access it. And best of all, as videos are uploaded to your video CMS they are automatically converted so they can be played by anyone on any device, without requiring anyone to download the entire video before playing or any other programs to play a video.

Easy information discovery through search

A video CMS enables your people to find quality educational videos created within your institution with a simple search. What’s more, some video CMSs can search inside video content so learners can jump to the exact moment a topic is shown on the screen or mentioned within an instructional video.

Create playlists of multiple videos on a single subject or skill

A video CMS lets you organize videos into folders and playlists (and even restrict or enable access to specific groups of videos if you need). This enables your viewers to browse educational video content from different parts of your organization, and even to view collections of videos that help them learn more about a particular subject or skill in particular.

Personalized, anytime-anywhere learning

On-demand videos empower learners to pause, rewind and replay lessons so they might better understand new concepts — something they can’t do during a live lecture or training event. With a YouTube-like video CMS, both employees and students can learn at their own pace, whenever the information is most relevant to their needs, and from anywhere and on any device. And it’s more than just a convenience — this form of embedded learning can drive nearly 3 times the improvement in learning outcomes compared to other approaches.

Panopto: It’s Everything YouTube Isn’t

In this on-demand webinar, we dig into 7 challenges of using YouTube for sharing private videos and discuss what makes a video platform like Panopto a better alternative. We’ll also look at how Panopto can help support training and communication within the enterprise, and give you a quick demonstration of Panopto so you can see for yourself just how easy it can be to put video to work for your organization.

Watch the webinar here >>