Last week, YouTube announced a new series of channel playlists featuring educational videos themed around specific academic subjects. The series targets students on summer vacation who wish to have an outlet for continued learning outside of the classroom – but clearly these videos can bring value to anyone with interest in the subject at hand.

The first playlist features videos all about Physics; drawn mostly from university and research centers lectures from around the country. This week, a playlist of videos on Art. YouTube has cleverly harnessed the power of the Internet to educate in an organized, neatly packaged way.

Today’s Internet has transformed into the go-to resource for anything we might want to accomplish, be it shopping, business networking, marketing, philanthropy, education or entertainment. You name it, there is an infinite amount of content out there just floating around, waiting to be stumbled upon.

Therein lies the uniqueness of the YouTube EDU playlists. YouTube has, in essence, assembled a lecture series of hand picked, curated content that, valuable though it may be, could very easily be overlooked due to the sheer amount of online content competing for our attention.

Twitter knows the value of in-platform sorting and sharing. Their List functionality is a great way to organize and present categories of information through the Twitter platform. With the EDU playlists, YouTube does something similar, making themed playlists a valuable resource.

Many of us have a matrix of folders in our web browser’s bookmark bars and RSS readers. But as we rely on our mobile devices for web access more than our traditional browser-based computers (which is already happening), little gems of in-platform, pre-filtered, pre-organized content, like YouTube’s playlists, are going to increase the efficiency and purpose with which we access and share information on the web.

By Emily Gibian

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