YouTube Launches a Video Program That Will Allow Students to Earn Real College Credits

YouTube is kicking off a series of online courses that can lead to earning official, transferable college credits, an initiative aimed at breaking down cost and accessibility barriers to higher education.

The program, called College Foundations, is an extension of YouTube's existing partnership with Arizona State University and educational video company Crash Course, which was launched by internet creators Hank and John Green. The partners have been posting college-related videos for nearly a year on the YouTube channel Study Hall, which has nearly 42,000 followers.

Starting Tuesday, people can sign up for up to four courses on the Study Hall channel, which will begin on March 7. Collectively called College Foundations, the first four courses are English Composition, College Math, US History, and Human Communication, which the partners said were selected for being among the most common elements of a first-year, general-education college curriculum. The College Foundations series is planned to expand to 12 courses by January 2025.

The videos in these courses on Study Hall are free to watch. Learners who want to get college credits can pay $25 to take full online courses at ASU that are mapped to those subjects and include direct communication with other students and teachers. These formal coursework programs last seven weeks, and if students are unsatisfied with their grade, they can retake the $25 course again without penalty until they've earned the grade they want.

The highest price comes if students wish to unlock college credits. A credit-free course is $400 per course, though people who sign up before March 7 qualify for a "scholarship" price of $350 each. The amount may give some people sticker shock, but YouTube and its partners said it represents less than one-third the average course cost at a public four-year university for in-state students and is nearly 90% lower than the average course cost at a private four-year university.

The credits can then be used at any institution that accepts ASU credits.

Ideally, the College Foundations program would also give learners confidence that they can handle college-level coursework and start earning credit toward a degree before committing to the greater expense and effort of applying to college, according to Katie Kurtz, the global head of learning at YouTube. When the number of courses in the series goes up to 12, she said, students could get "an entire full year of college credits before you've even had to apply."

This new part of their partnership, where college credits can be transferred, shows how much YouTube cares about education. YouTube itself, with more than 2 billion monthly users and a tight connection to the world's most pervasive internet search engine, is one of the most impactful sources of online information on Earth. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, the daughter of a professor and a teacher, routinely touts YouTube as an educational resource.

"YouTube is where the world comes to learn," Wojcicki said in a statement about the new program. "By working with ASU and Crash Course, we're excited to use our platform to give learners the tools they need to go to college and make the path easier to take and cheaper."

Kurtz said none of the fees associated with the College Foundations credit-earning courses generate revenue for YouTube, and the Study Hall channel, which is a collaboration of ASU and Crash Course, doesn't have advertising. (Crash Course has its own YouTube channel, which does have ads; some Study Hall videos coexist on the Crash Course channel.)

She characterized the project as the product of more than four years of working to figure out ways the informal learning that people glean from YouTube can be part of a pathway to more formal learning experiences, ones where learners' acquired knowledge gets some external recognition. "This is one enhancement of many that you'll be seeing," she said.

Original Source : https://www.cnet.com/