Revolutionizing Education: YouTube's AI Integration for Interactive Learning

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. Today on the podcast, I want to talk about AI and education. And there's some really interesting news about some really interesting applications in AI coming out of Google's YouTube, how they're implementing AI for some really interesting educational stuff.

0:42But I also want to talk about some broader ideas around how I believe AI will be implemented into education and how AI is going to revolutionize education. So without further ado, let's jump into it. So the first thing to talk about is kind of the big headline story. A recent article in TechCrunch broke the news that YouTube is testing AI-generated quizzes on educational videos. First off, I think this is an absolutely amazing use case. So essentially, they're experimenting with adding AI-generated quizzes on their mobile app for iOS and Android, which are designed essentially to help the viewers learn more about a subject featured in an educational video.

1:19So the idea with this feature is also for it to help the video sharing platform get a better understanding of how well each video covers a certain topic. You know, there's always kind of like a double edged sword on these kind of stories. So on the one hand, it's kind of like, I don't know, it's kind of funny. Like on the one hand, it's a cool feature. On the other hand, it's almost like more the ability for YouTube to gather more data for its ad network to see how relevant certain ideas or topics or, you know, how well a video covers something. So that's kind of interesting. And maybe some people have privacy issues with that.

1:51So that'll be an interesting thing to cover. But I think one thing that's really awesome is like the fact, you know, when I was in college, even a lot of different classes as homework, they'd say, hey, watch like X, Y, and Z YouTube videos. And then you come to class and they do quizzes on, you know, something you might have learned from a YouTube video or whatever. And this is going to be a real cool way for YouTube to kind of embed that right in. I'd be curious to see if they'll, you know, create a platform or a way for educators to be able to see what their students rated or maybe even for parents.

2:22Right. You have to imagine this has to live somewhere like these quizzes have to be viewed by someone other than just YouTube. Like what YouTube's going to rate your kids on how well they retain something from a YouTube video. So I think that's, to me, the more interesting aspect if they start integrating this in a way that like, you know, parents might be able to view it and help their kids or educators, teachers might be able to see how their students have responded to the quiz questions and maybe take a load off of teachers or load off of parents. But overall, I think this is a really cool concept.

2:53Essentially, the AI generated quizzes were recently noted on their experiments page yesterday, but they're going to be rolling out globally to a relatively small percentage of users that watch a quote unquote a few educational videos. and so the quiz feature is only available for different just for a handful of portions of the English language content that is going to be there and that's going to appear on the home feed as links under recently watched videos so I think what's interesting is the fact that not all of YouTube's experiments actually end up making it onto the platform so they have said right this is an experiment this isn't necessarily like an instant rollout of a platform-wide feature so because of that I do think it's going to be something to watch and see if this is actually something that you know sticks around if this is something that is going to be permanent on the platform or if this is one of the many things that is going to end up on the google graveyard twitter account so I think we're not really sure exactly at the moment how many people are going to be seeing this especially if they're you know not in school and also we're not sure how many people are going to be wanting to take these quizzes while you might be, you know, scrolling through YouTube, especially if you're not in school, like I said, because if you're not a student, yeah, you know, so I think it's going to be interesting to see how this is rolled out, because if this is just like a thing where it's like, oh, students, test your retention of this, like, thing, like, I think you'll get a relatively small amount of people that actually want to just, like, voluntarily participate, aka fill out a survey or just more ad revenue or ad data for YouTube.

4:29So I think if that's their implementation and their angle with this, it'll be pretty dumb. if they're able to make this a really useful tool with schools, which there is precedent that they might be moving in that direction. So I do have hope for it. And if that's the case, I think this will be, you know, really powerful, really cool tool. YouTube does, though, have a really long established kind of history as a destination for people to learn things, right? Whether that's, you know, I've learned how to replace parts on a car before and do all sorts of landscaping and cleaning, you know, my roof and different random things.

5:05I always go to YouTube for that. And so I think this whole kind of what people call, quote unquote, edutainment is a whole area on YouTube. You have really big accounts like HowToBasic or TED-Ed that essentially are popular educational YouTube channels that are, you know, teaching you how to do something or about a specific topic. And like channels like that, I think I think TED-Ed has like over 18 million subscribers. How to Basic has over like 17 million subscribers. So these are really large audiences. These are like a lot of people are very interested in education on YouTube. There's you know, there's probably like 10 ,000 really pop like super popular, successful educational channels on YouTube.

5:49I don't even know them all. I'm always excited when I find a new one. I watch a lot of random like engineering channels on YouTube where they build cool little robotics or toys. I watch that with my son to try to, you know, get him interested in engineering and building things. And so I think this is really definitely a very big space. I think it's this big demograph on YouTube. And so I think in addition, like I mentioned earlier with, you know, when I was in college, a lot of our teachers were using YouTube for homework or for other things, finding a video and having us watch it and then do quizzes on it.

6:19I think a lot of teachers go to YouTube to create educational content or to discover like new videos they can share to add extra perspective on a specific topic. And I know from my own experience, I've seen, you know, both cases when I taught at university, I would often upload content to YouTube, send it out to the students. Sometimes I just keep it as a private video, right? Or sometimes it'd be public. and I would have students watch that and use that for whatever our next section or whatever our next topic that we were studying would be. So I think for that and for people that genuinely want to learn more about a topic, the new quiz feature could be an effective way to gain a little bit of a deeper insight into the material.

7:02And there is precedent for, in my opinion, YouTube going in the right direction with this and partnering with educators because just recently, a little bit earlier this year, YouTube actually partnered with Crash Course, which is a popular YouTube channel. It's got like 1.6 billion views. I think it's got almost 50 million subs. It's run by John and Hank Green. But Crash Course and Arizona State University partnered with YouTube and they launched what's called its Study Hall Initiative, which essentially gives college students free access to four main courses that are covering a bunch of different topics.

7:39So pretty much college math, U.S. history, English composition, and a couple more. So it's a pretty popular channel. And the fact that YouTube is kind of partnering with them and also ASU in this move, I believe, is a good step in the right direction. I think I'd like to see more of those kind of, you know, partnerships and asking, you know, educators what would be useful for them, finding ways to integrate into tools that they can actually use these quizzes to test their students instead of simply, you know, just, I don't know, throwing a random quiz on there and telling you, hey, congratulations, you did well on your random YouTube quiz that will be used to gather data to sell you more ads.

8:18Like, I don't think that will be the sales pitch they want. And so I think the sales pitch they want is these quizzes will be built using AI, which I think is an awesome application for AI. It's an awesome application for education in general. And yeah, I think that's the angle that they want to take. I think overall, there's a couple of different areas that I myself have realized will be really big for AI, for chat GPT, specifically in education. And so I wanted to cover those real quick with you. The first one is personalized tutoring. Obviously, I think one of the most exciting possibilities with ChatGPT is just its potential to deliver personalized results to every student, every learning style, every space, or every pace of learning.

9:01And so I think that will be a big one. The other one is supplementing classroom teaching. So in addition to whatever you learn in the class, which in my personal opinion is a broken archaic system, controversial, right? I think that this definitely needs to be supplementary. I think you want a kid to go on ChatGPT and ask a bunch of questions about a topic and learn about it with their own questions because it walks them through how they process a certain topic or situation. and you want to make sure that everything's covered. But I think Chachapiti could do a really awesome job of doing that supplemental to the classroom teaching that they get there.

9:41The third one is enhancing accessibility. I think that the fact that Chachapiti is obviously always on your phone at any time. You can ask it a question like Google. It's going to have the same impact where people are getting questions very rapidly. Another one is just essentially helping to develop critical thinking skills. And I'm not saying that ChatGPT necessarily is going to teach you or your child or someone critical thinking skills, but I do think that it can help them develop processes for thinking. I think you can argue that the utility of AI in education goes beyond essentially just learning facts and figures.

10:18And with an AI tool like ChatGPT, students could essentially be encouraged to ask more questions, challenge the AI's response, and develop their own critical thinking skills. Now, the funny thing about that is I think it's really important. we've seen this out of Japan's Ministry of Education recently, where they have essentially said, it's important that we're all teaching our students the fact that AI can make stuff up. And they literally have the educators over in Japan giving them fake information that AI generated and saying, spot this or double fact check it and teaching them the importance of doing that.

10:52And they're actually applying that. And so in a way, I think that developing critical thinking skills is something that's going to inevitably happen from the use of chat GPT. and a lot of people talk about the negative side effects of, you know, AI hallucinating, which of course they exist. But I think one of the positive side effects is it will cause you to, it will cause people to question the information they receive and do their own research to dig a little deeper in whatever way they plan on doing that and to try to find really good results and to fact check everything that they get. And of course people are like, oh no, we don't want to teach kids to, I don't know, I don't know how that's too controversial.

11:28I don't know how that would be controversial to teach kids to be critical thinkers and to think critically about all the information they're presented in every forum, right? Like everything you're taught in school isn't necessarily accurate or true. Wow, that might be controversial, but it's true, right? Like we change history. We learn new facts. We learn new archaeological data. The new evidence emerges on different law cases. Like facts and information change all the time. And so I think critical thinking will be developed as kids learn that AI can hallucinate. And what other things in the world do they need to question?

12:07What other ideologies should be considered? Should they dig deeper on? And it's really interesting. I feel like myself in particular, the older I get, the more of my worldviews I end up challenging. And many of my worldviews have changed drastically over the last number of years, even over the last, you know, two or three years on a lot of different topics. My opinions on AI have changed a lot since, you know, ChatGPT launched. and even over the last few months with the new data and new information I have new concerns about AI new thoughts about AI how it's getting implemented and I think a lot of that is just developed critical thinking on a lot of that is due to the fact that I think I have done a lot of my own independent fact checking which I think is super important for people in education and students to learn how to do so overall I'm really excited for the implications of AI in education I see this as being a really big space, so it'll be very interesting to follow this into the future.