More courses, more colleges: YouTube EDU turns one

A college education is something many people take for granted, but only about 1% of the world actually gets one. A year ago today, YouTube EDU (youtube.com/edu) launched with a very simple mission: deliver some of the world’s greatest university courses to anyone with an Internet connection and a screen.

Whether it’s Salman Rushdie reading poetry by the last mughal king to Emory University students, or a lecture in electrical engineering at UC Berkeley, YouTube EDU has helped some of the oldest institutions on the planet blaze a trail into the 21st century by opening up a rich and empowering corpus of video content to aspiring students everywhere.

YouTube EDU is now one of the largest online video repositories of higher education content in the world. We have tripled our partner base to over 300 universities and colleges, including University of Cambridge, Yale, Stanford, MIT, University of Chicago and The Indian Institutes of Technology. We have grown to include university courses in seven languages across 10 countries. We now have over 350 full courses, a 75% increase from a year ago and thousands of aspiring students have viewed EDU videos tens of millions of times. And today, the EDU video library stands at over 65,000 videos.

We have also rolled out new products to make this coursework more accessible, including adding automated captions and auto-translation to videos spoken in English. In just a few clicks, you can generate captions and translate courses into one of 50 different languages.

At the end of the day, YouTube EDU is about using the democratic nature of the Internet and the power of video to make higher learning accessible to all. We’ve heard from thousands of users like trainerstone, who writes: “Thank you so much for your videos. I live in provincial Philippines and have very little access to the arts and academic stimulus.” But perhaps one user put it best: “This is what the Internet was created for.”

Here’s to another great year of great educational content on YouTube. Until then, keep watching and keep learning.

Obadiah Greenberg, Strategic Partner Manager, recently watched “Khan Academy on PBS NewsHour.”