Making better research videos, part two
Business schools vs YouTubers
Who can you trust, the public intellectuals...
In what is, perhaps, direct opposition to the enormous engagement potential on platforms like YouTube1, and in spite of institutions’ impact agendas2, the academic’s role as public intellectual has been in steep decline.
This has been attributed to a growing sentiment that universities are
“bastions of elitist and detached liberals with little to nothing to offer society”3.
They present a challenge:
“On the one hand, notions of engagement and knowledge transfer have taken centre stage in higher education institutions in their desire to create impact with the general public and non-academic institutions. But on the other hand, these societies are witnessing an apparent decline in the role and importance of the public intellectual”4.
Who’s filling the vacuum? YouTubers and Podcasters
Who do you trust for finance and investment advice?
Australian business schools are lucky to have a few thousand subscribers on YouTube5. Their channels are, typically, dumping grounds for pretty much any video they make: recruitment marketing, research profiles, webinars etc.
At the same time, business schools are repositories of in demand knowledge. On topics like IPOs, investor behaviour, emerging markets, fintech, asset bubbles and market sentiment.
One of Australia’s leading finance and investment YouTube channel, New Money, has over 800,000 subscribers and aroung 60,000,000 views. The channel’s founder and lead content creator, Brandon Van Der Kolk, is a physiotherapist. And in his own words6
“People think I’m some kind of economist or some finance dude, I have no formal training in stock market investing.”
There’s something very wrong with this picture7.
The case for creative videos
Our understanding of screen content has undergone profound change with the rise in popularity of YouTube. And with this change, the online audience for educational videos has grown significantly in recent years. YouTube channels, like Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, have become leaders in the dissemination of information and ideas.
As a result, audiences now have far greater expectations around the content that they will engage with.
In contrast, academics can struggle to effectively communicate and engage audiences beyond their peers in the relevance of their work.
Universities do produce a lot of pretty good videos. But, broadly speaking, they haven’t kept pace with rapidly evolving audience expectations for video content that entertains and inspires.
Extensive study has been undertaken on the value of researchers sharing their work, beyond their peers, to non-academic audiences. Scholars agree, generally, that social media and video sharing platforms like YouTube are fantastic avenues to engage audiences in the impact of research.
But there are tensions that need to be addressed.
Warning!
Before proceeding, it’s important to acknowledge that social media and content creation does have its risks. From an ill-informed tweet to an off-hand comment on a podcast, or maybe even a viral video on a contentious subject, you have to expect that anything you post online is permanent and has the potential to come back and haunt you8. Even if you’re just posting about your research you can still find yourself on the receiving end of abuse from the public, and even your fellow academics9.
So, sharing your research and engaging non-academic audiences is important. But try to take care in what you say, and how you say it.
Next, is part three: Engagement potential on the fringes
If this is your first article in this series, head back to the start
Just a couple, of the many, scholars that see the value in, and encourage pursuit of, public research engagement. In Elevate the Debate, scholars investigate different aspects of, and avenues for, engagement and realising research impact; and Rankin provides practical guidance for sharing your work and raising your research profile.
Schwabish, J. A. (2020). Elevate the debate: a multi-layered approach to communicating your research (First edition. ed.). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Rankin, J. G. (2020). Increasing the impact of your research : a practical guide to sharing your findings and widening your reach. Routledge.
In The Impactful Academic Monash University’s Dr Wade Kelly describes research impact as the positive change in the world that research helps to generate.
Ford, D. R., & Jandric, P. (2019). The Public Intellectual Is Dead, Long Live the Public Intellectual!
Murphy, M., & Costa, C. (2019). Digital scholarship, higher education and the future of the public intellectual. It’s worth noting that both of these papers are now four years old. But, I’d suggest things have gotten even worse. Definitely not better.
Monash Business School appears to have the strongest subscriber base, at 7000 at time of publication.
This is a particularly salacious example. But you can actually check out some great academic YouTube channels about finance and economics. Such as, Unlearning Economics, Money & Macro, and Patrick Boyle on Finance. To me, what this represents is both a challenge (countering bad business) and an opportunity (meaningful engagement). And although I’ve used business schools as the example, I’m confident this same case study could be made for most other disciplines.
Here’s just one example or careers ruined, before they even got started, by doing dumb stuff on the internet: Victorian Greens stand by candidates despite date rape lyrics and 'offensive' Facebook pages
Britton et al. are active users of social media but, though rarely, can come find themselves “on the receiving end of nasty attacks from the general public as well as from other academics”.
Britton, B., Jackson, C., & Wade, J. (2019). The reward and risk of social media for academics. Nature reviews. Chemistry, 3(8), 459-461.