YouTube has announced the winners of its Next EDU Guru contest, a competition launched last month with the Khan Academy to find the next generation of YouTube educators.
More than 1,000 creators applied for the position, which would require them to make eight educational videos by January 2013 with training, promotion, and a $1,000 gift card for production equipment. Ultimately, a panel had the final say.
“We whittled the group down to 10 YouTube EDU Gurus who we hope will continue to contribute to the great corpus of educational videos that will make up YouTube EDU,” wrote Austin Lau of YouTube Creator Programs.
Each winner made an introduction video to explain what they do and what they plan to cover, which the YouTube Next Lab put together in one video.
From two biologists covering science topics on a whiteboard to a homeschooled son and his father, the 10 Gurus come from all different backgrounds and education expertise. Two of the channels are based in Canada while another creator is in England. The rest of the creators are from all over the U.S.
The new educational YouTubers plan to tackle everything from math, science, history, and foreign languages such as Spanish and Japanese among others. One ambitious channel plans to explain how various subjects relate to classic art.
Mitchell Moffit, one half of asapSCIENCE (and one of the YouTube EDU Gurus), hopes that people will realize that science is cool through their videos.
“We’re interested in inspiring people who maybe don’t know a lot about science and think of it as this hard subject in school,” Moffit told the Daily Dot in September.
The demand for educational videos have been on the rise since the Khan Academy’s Sal Khan uploaded his first video in 2006, with billions of views logged each year, according to Lau.
“There’s no way that online video can replace physical classrooms led by educators,” John Green, one half of the popular YouTube duo vlogBrothers, told the Daily Dot earlier this year. “But in the developing world, these resources could really be revolutionary.”
Photo via NextLabEvents/YouTube
