Teaching a YouTube Course Online

This chapter presents a case study of the author’s work developing and teaching an online course called YouTube for Educators, which is offered as an elective in an online graduate program in educational technology. The course was developed in response to the upsurge in online video production and the prominence of YouTube™ among video-sharing services. A number of challenges surfaced when designing and implementing the course. The necessity of frequent curriculum updates to keep content current with advancements in digital video technologies added to instructor workload. Course policies also had to be written for situations where unexpected changes on the YouTube website interfered with planned assignments. The experience of designing, teaching, redesigning, and re-teaching the course led to the discovery of best practice, which may apply to other courses featuring rapidly changing content or Web 2.0 tools