YouTube has emerged as a hub for educational content in India, with videos related to the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) exam as the most popular category of such content on the platform.
In an interview with indianexpress.com, Jonathan Katzman, the director of product management at YouTube Learning, said that the video-streaming giant wants to ensure that all types of exam preparation content is available for users, including those related to competitive entrance exams in the country such as the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) and Joint Entrance Examination (JEE).
“We see many creators within India leaning into live sessions in particular and solving doubts for students right before an exam. They really put the student front and centre with their easy rapport with students, and they make sure that they have a very strong sense of community,” Katzman said, when asked about the growing popularity of Indian exam-prep creators on YouTube.
Capitalising on India’s surge in demand for online educational content, YouTube recently announced a partnership with the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), a government advisory body on school education, to launch multiple YouTube Channels over the next few months.
These channels will carry educational content pertaining to the curricula of students from grades 1 to 12. It will be available in 29 Indian languages, the company said.
YouTube partnership with NCERT, NPTEL
Besides NCERT, YouTube said it is rolling out 50 credentialed courses in collaboration with the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL). The courses offered on NPTEL’s YouTube Channels will focus on a diverse range of subjects such as pure sciences, literature, sports psychology, and rocket propulsion, among others.
“Through this initiative, a pathway has been created for anyone outside the IIT system to be able to do a course on NPTEL’s YouTube channels and then complete the online certification on the NPTEL-SWAYAM portal and get a certificate from the IITs,” YouTube said in a blog post, adding that more courses will be rolled out in the coming months.
However, students and learners in remote parts of India do not have equitable access to the internet and other digital resources. According to the latest data by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), only 24 per cent of rural Indian households have access to the internet, compared to 66 per cent penetration in cities.
When asked how the YouTube-NCERT partnership would help bridge the country’s yawning digital divide, Katzman said, “We look to our partners in India to ensure that those students have the right access to technology, whether that is phones or computers in the school or shared resources in the home.”
“Our job is to democratise knowledge, to enable any creator, whether they are new or established, to put out the right learning content and to work with partners like NCERT, NPTEL, and CBSE,” he said.
AI features to enhance learning
In addition to partnerships with educational bodies, YouTube is looking to make learning more accessible in India by offering AI-driven features. “We spent a lot of time both within YouTube and Google, on how to use AI to do really good learning for our users and do it in a way where the user’s learning is enhanced and not taken from them,” Katzman said.
The platform will be rolling out a new learning feature called Key Concepts in India. This feature uses AI to identify concepts covered in a video and provide definitions from the web of those concepts. It can cover concepts related to various subjects like biology, physics, and chemistry.
“We use AI to understand how the creator talks about that concept and weave together that narrative for the learner so that they could fully grasp what is exactly happening in that video,” Katzman said.
Based on the transcript of the video and its metadata, YouTube will also show users definitions and images from Google’s Knowledge Graph.
To help students test their knowledge, the platform is introducing AI-generated quizzes. The quiz questions will be based on the topics of videos that a user watches and will appear right after they have watched a video, as per the company.
On whether AI chatbots and personalised AI tutors could deter users from going on YouTube for consuming educational content, Katzman replied that purely learning by chatbot is very hard. “It’s a lot of text to read. You need to really understand what are the right questions, which you don’t need to know with YouTube videos and with our creators.”
“Students and learners really love getting that personal connection. They love learning in community and being able to talk to other learners in the comments and talk to the creator. This helps them really understand the material,” he further said.
In response to whether AI could take the jobs of educators, Katzman argued, “We’re not trying to replace the teacher at all. This is much more about enabling institutions to partner with their teachers, give them better learning content, and make their job to teach students go more smoothly and enable them to do a better job at teaching.”
Reliability of educational content
Asked how YouTube is ensuring the accuracy and reliability of educational content on its platform, Katzman said that its in-built features such as AI-generated quizzes undergo “a lot of testing and a lot of evaluation” but did not elaborate.
“If something got published incorrectly, we’re able to very quickly take content down,” he said. “In terms of the content that creators are publishing, that needs to play by our community guidelines,” the YouTube executive said.
Digital safety and education have been at the centre of debates sparked by Australia’s social media ban against under-16 children. While the ban is yet to be implemented, it is likely that YouTube may be exempted as it is considered to be a “classroom staple”.
When asked if such an exemption for YouTube was justified given concerns around increasing screen time and content moderation, Katzman only referred to the company’s official response and said, “It is not an area that I’m highly qualified to give you information on.”
