Making sense of comments on YouTube educational videos: a self-directed learning perspective

Purpose - Through the lens of self-directed theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate if social technologies such as YouTube will be viable to disseminate educational instructions and in the process empowering learners to take charge of their learning. Design/methodology/approach - A total of 150 educational videos on YouTube were selected and 29,386 comments extracted using the authors' customized extraction software application. Sentiment and qualitative content analyses were performed. Findings - Results indicate that YouTube can play important roles in facilitating online self-directed learning (SDL) as the findings uncovered a variety of learning and social affordances of YouTube. However, caution should be exercised as high views and well-commented videos might not imply quality and credibility. This study concludes that YouTube generally provides a conducive a learning environment that affords learners the resources to meet their SDL objectives. Research limitations/implications - To the best of knowledge, this is the first study that investigates SDL in social media by combining both qualitative content and sentiment analyses. The study shows that such a hybrid approach of combining two diverse analytical techniques provides an innovative means to make sense of comments expressed in social media. Practical implications - The results will help educational institutions and policy-makers to craft better programs for public education and create policies to help self-directed learners in evaluating online video resources. Originality/value - Despite a wealth of literature on the use of technologies to support learning, the majority of work done to date has dealt in the classroom context. Studies on SDL using educational content on YouTube are limited. Hence, this research contributes by providing insights on how educational institutions can move toward the direction of building collaborative digital learning platforms with relevant educational instruction and resources to enable users to participate in lifelong self-learning and education.