Study YouTube made me judge my academic performance, how I learn, what I do, how I work, and most significant to me, it challenged my degrees, the last 5 years of my life.
Educational background
Let me set the scene for you. At school sport was my thing. Living in the UK and being a boy, football was expected of me.
At break time and lunch time, you played football with the rest of the year group. My primary school didn’t let us use actual footballs because of safety reasons so we used tennis balls.
Lets just say, my schools shoes never looked very nice.
But trampoline was also a big sport of mine since about 12 years old. I was good, but not that good.
Playing and getting involved in other sports was who I was. Archery, shooting, climbing, and loads of other skills with scouts. Through beavers scouts, cub scouts, scout scouts, I even did explorer scouts for a while.
With physical activity and sport being my thing. A traditional or stereotypical view could suggest my academic ability would be lacking.
Almost like a social rule, you can’t be smart and good at sports. I am definitely no genius but when I was younger, I wasn’t afraid to point out things that I thought were wrong.
Like most kids, I thought I had the answer to everything and was right all the time.
I was in top set for most subjects but that doesn’t really mean much. If you are good at math and English you were thrown in the top set. I was in top art and to this day still draw derpy looking stick figures.
So logically, when I got to pick subjects at school they were sport related. PE but I also needed other subjects so did dance, another physical subject, and triple science. Physics, chemistry and biology.
At college or sixth form, the step between school and university, I did, you guessed it, A level PE, A level biology, A level Math, and BTEC sport.
Moving through University a similar story. My undergraduate bachelor of science degree was in, sports coaching, and postgraduate master of science degree in, strength and conditioning.
The plan was to go into the world of high performance sport. However, the stuff I had learned in my degrees were not being used in the clubs I did placements at.
Concepts, topics, philosophies of learning, were either not spoken about, ignored, or the coaches had never even heard of them.
In the second half of my masters degree, while I am doing placements with these coaches that just don’t understand what I am talking about, I start looking online for answers.
Are other coaches talking about this stuff I have learned about?
What are other coaches doing in their practice, and does it follow the lectures I had been listening to for the last 4 years.
Why are these really obvious things, that help, not being spoken about?
I felt like I had wasted, not only 4 almost 5 years of my life researching, testing, and learning about things that are potentially wrong or at least not used.
But that the money I would have to pay back was not worth it.
Side note here, UK student finance works different from the US so isn’t as debilitating but still, an issue.
Most significant to my mental health tho, was that I thought was way far behind on where I thought should be before I start working in high performance sport. Maybe it was imposter syndrome but I think it was related to other issues I had at the time.
but seeing these study related video popping up I thought, coaching, teaching, studying, they are all similar, not the same but there must be transferable research.
These people must also know what they are talking about because they are presenting it online.
Bare in mind, at this point, YouTube education was in a drastically different position. My experience of social media and online interaction didn’t go further than my Xbox live conversations from when I like 12.
And most the people I was finding were medical students, or people at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, academic institutions with incredible reputations.
Surely they know what they are talking about. So I thought, lets watch some of these videos to learn more about what they are doing.
Maybe that will help.
Study tips
I still remember some of the first videos I watched.
This medical student, doctor person appeared on YouTube and I thought, there are graphs, this looks professional.
In my head, graphs mean, analysis. Analysis means research. And research means, I could find the things I am missing.
This is when I was introduced to active recall. It is a buzzword all over YouTube now, but when I first heard about it, I was so confused.
How can 4 years of higher education about learning science not teach me about active recall. Not only that, not even introduce me to the term.
Maybe there wasn’t research to back up the claims, no. There was a meta analysis and research papers going back years.
My head of course was either not aware of this thing that a medical student found, or was deliberately not telling me about this stuff.
Rereading, highlighting, summarizing all the note taking tips were coming up.
Now hands up, I didn’t take notes at university. I was even kicked out of a couple lectures for not having a note book or laptop to take notes on.
My main reason is because I am half deaf. Listening to someone talk at the front of a lecture hall with other people making noises around me is hard.
Lip reading becomes really helpful. But if I am looking at a screen or note pad, I can’t lip read.
During my trampoline judging days I learned to write numbers down a page without looking, because I am looking at the competitor but trust me, not looking at your screen or pad when taking notes can lead to a big mess.
Before you comment about touch typing. I can. I tried. But spelling is not my strong suit either. So I had to check what I typed wasn’t just a line of red squiggles.
Towards the end of the video flashcards are mentioned and, lets just say I was, and am still not, a fan.
For the purpose of sport, they also don’t really help. Remembering to move your leg forward to kick a ball is obvious, I don’t need a flash card for that.
But then pops up another term, spaced repetition.
Like seriously, how do I not know about these terms. I am a 2:1 students, do all the pre-reading. Spend my days looking into the research because it interests me but have never heard of these terms before.
Am I a really bad student?
Further down the YouTube rabbit hole I go and find the Feynman technique.
Not the most academically rigorous technique, but it is still all over study YouTube. Small creators, large creators, Universities suggesting this technique for learning.
Make it stick is a book all about learning, full of things I wasn’t really looking into.
At this point I am like ok, maybe coaching physical skills or motor skills is really different from teaching mental things or cognitive skills.
As a student, I need to understand how to learn better myself, so I can coach better. Getting into high performance sport was never going to be easy.
So how do I improve myself?
Self improvement
Views on study YouTube channels are really ramping up at this point, lots of students watching other students finding out the tips to get better grades.
I was learning about active recall, spaced repetition, ideas like priming before lessons. My grades weren’t going anywhere but I felt like I was doing something.
It felt productive at least.
The self help productivity content, was everywhere.
How to study when your tired.
How to study when your not motivated.
How to set study goals.
How to get better grades.
I spent way to much time watching study vlog videos. But there were so many gems that I didn’t know about.
During a masters degree in strength and conditioning looking at pedagogy and andragogy, learning science for children and adults, I wasn’t being told about this stuff.
Interleaving.
The flow state.
Time management skills.
When I heard about them I was like. Come on, this is so obvious now. Maybe YouTube should have run my course.
But there were some topics like differentiation, desirable difficulty, comfort zones, motivation, reflection, feedback loads of concepts I was all too familiar with.
And when I heard about these creators talking about these topics I got confused again.
Reflection was being spoken about, but the advice was all evaluation. Something my lecturer spoke about a lot. Evaluation and reflection are different things.
Saying something is good or bad, making a comparison to something is evaluation.
Reflection is going deeper and asking questions like, why was it bad in that context? What could you have done differently? Would doing it differently make it worse in another context?
Essentially, critically thinking about the decisions being made, going deeper and deeper with the questions.
Maybe I was just being picky, the lectures were 2 hours long and lasted over months, whereas these video’s were like max 20 minutes.
But this kept happening.
New topics were being brought to study YouTube, things I was very familiar with. Some I had written essays on. And the videos just weren’t quite right.
The more study YouTube grew, the more topics were being repeated, the more these concepts and ideas were shared.
But this also meant more people sharing things that they either mis-heard, mis understood, or just didn’t really understand well.
In my head I am thinking ok, maybe I have filled those gaps that I had.
Then I find this community of learners. The next level learners. The second brainers.
Second Brain learners
These people are talking my language. These people are talking about note taking, personal knowledge management, second brains like all the learning science.
Even the study YouTubers I was following were talking about these people. Tiago was the figure head of this second brain movement and that is when I realised, this is what I am missing.
I am missing the deeper, nuanced, more personalized help the YouTube videos don’t seem to quite go into.
Then lockdown happened.
My graduation for a masters degree was over a web call. No I didn’t bother going. I got the piece of paper tho.
But the study videos ramped up.
Students on YouTube were popping up everywhere. A lot of them medical students. But also lots of readers.
Reading has always bored me. The last book I read was in primary school when I was like 9 or 10. And I only read it because it was homework I had to do that my Mum watched me do.
That isn’t to say I don’t read.
I read a lot of articles, and sections of books. But I don’t buy books, or read them from cover to cover.
The sections of books I do read are often chapters that have been published separately, and I don’t even read the hole thing a lot of the time.
But all these study YouTubers. A* 1st class degree students seemed to be reading loads.
Taking lots of notes. Using the cornell note taking method, or whatever other method.
Using a read it later app for highlighting points. Even tho the earlier videos said highlighting wasn’t great.
Everyone was organizing their lives, specifically their studying in calendars, planners, tasks lists.
Notion obviously making its run to the top at this point.
Suddenly apps became the thing I was missing.
All of this build up of reading, note taking, learning, memory and applications lead me to buying my first online course, building a second brain by Tiago Forte.
The tide was about the change.
Light bulb moment
Videos on YouTube were still exploding with views as I start going through this course, with really 1 question in mind.
Why does the information shared on YouTube not match up with my degrees?
I have paid for this course.
This course is for learners.
A group of people teaching me what they know from learning science.
I know that sounds kinda silly saying that out load.
I am going to pay for a course, for them to tell me why the other courses I paid for didn’t match the free content I heard online.
and to my surprise, yeah no no I didn’t get an answer.
I did get lots of repeated advice.
Lots of interesting stories of how others work.
Lots of ideas and frameworks of ways people think.
But it was nothing I hadn’t heard before on study YouTube, or the some what connected world of self help productivity YouTube.
Failure is good for learning.
You can’t multi task so prioritize.
Don’t try and remember everything write it down.
Plan things out.
Set goals.
It felt like an answer machine. You call in and you get a default response at the phone with templated advice.
This is when I needed to take a step back and do what my degrees had taught me to do in the first place, reflect.
Be a reflective practitioner.
The Collapse
The study YouTubers, what were they saying that was different or new?
What was the evidence?
Was the evidence relevant?
Was the evidence high quality?
How did the science match up with what I was taught?
But I kept coming back to the same question, why wasn’t I taught this?
Then I realised I needed to re-phrase the question, were those topics left out for a reason?
So I went back to active recall. I was taught about it. But through the lens of skill acquisition.
You see active recall was a substitute term for retrieval practice. Retrieval coming from cognitive science and practice being part of learning science.
I had done entire modules covarying various elements of practice.
Blocked, serial, random, constant, variable going into details about randomness, repetition without repetition, differential learning, different mechanisms that could be involved and it just goes on and on.
Retrieval is part of cognitive science. Not something I studied specifically but when you go a little deeper you find memory. Then perception.
And perception and action is part of skill acquisition.
I hadn’t made the connection before that, what I was taught, were the next steps, the nuance, the nitty gritty of active recall.
Study YouTube was simplifying my degrees to a point that I didn’t recognize it anymore.
And while I am realising this, the views are dropping. The creators are changing. This world of study YouTube as I know it, is collapsing.
Ali, one of the biggest names moved towards helping others be YouTubers talking about business.
Thomas, moved in a similar direction towards helping entrepreneurs and business organize their lives in Notion.
Other students moving off into their own small niches or focusing back on their won education.
Study YouTube was merging into the lifestyle vlog genre.
People talking about their lives, telling people what they are doing, what they are learning as they go.
When looking at the wider scope of education on YouTube you have the traditional educators, physics, math, engineering, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience all the fields.
Then the video essay channels and documentary channels sharing their views on literally any topic.
But now I am back at square one. Degrees of information with only the academics or coaches in the know to talk to.
Elizabeth is a breath of fresh air, but I am not seeing much that is new.
Similar advice with a different delivery.
Justin has added some research into the conversation which is where I hope this genre goes.
But like any scientific field, I have my own critiques of the science he shares, and advice he gives.
What I am learning
What I am learning, is that like in chess, you can be told the right moves in the opening, but if your opponent plays a bad move, you need to know how to capitalize.
If information shared is wrong, oversimplified, or out of context, you need to be able to act.
Once all the basics have been said, there is nothing left to add, unless you do the research.
That is why ecological dynamics and the stuff I was taught is not well known. It is deep in weeds of skill acquisition in sports coaching.
Not yet discussed, critiqued, applied well outside of the little corner of research it is in.
I think study YouTube collapsed because those in it, either moved on, or didn’t know what was next.
But that is what I am interested in.
That is what I am learning about.
