platoedu.org
I watch A LOT of educational YouTube videos but wasn't forgetting a good chunk of the details because I was only really passively watching. So I made a tool that generates quiz questions/flashcards from YouTube videos, and uses spaced repetition like Anki or Duolingo to keep it in memory.
Let me know if you find it cool/useful (or terrible ) or if you want to know a bit about the details!
I know you've addressed the video selection in the playlists, but I would highly suggest doing something to get it to differentiate "educational entertainment" videos (I notice a lot of Real Engineering and Economics Explained and CGP Grey videos) and actual education videos: primary-source explainers from teachers and subject-matter experts. The information density in the latter is way higher, and I think people overestimate the educational value of the former.
I disagree. Some people might overestimate how in-depth the information is, but the educational value of these videos lies in giving someone a basic understanding of something they otherwise wouldn't have learnt about at all. The lower information density helps making the video easier to understand and thus easier to consume, compared to something like a Havard class.
If you want to learn something in-depth, an actual class, a book, etc. will of course always be better, but if that's neither required nor wanted, the infotainment is just fine.
I have been wanting to build a YT front-end that lets me control how many "new" videos are recommended. New videos are the time-sinks.
Instead this new FE should make me re-watch so I absorb and retain better - maybe thru more Q&A like OP's platoedu or even make me write out some notes. Then I am forced to curate videos and maybe be more productive.
One of my ideas that's on the backburner is build a BERT classifier to separate between Educational, edu-tainment, and random, then use that to filter suggestions from the ones of people that use Plato
Anyway if you have any good suggestions for better educational content I'd love to add that to Plato over the categories I have now!
The YT algo is pretty good - it catches on to what I want to follow and magnifies (ie suggest more content on) that topic. But it never pushes me to educational videos.
I suspect educational videos are best to watch on Coursera. I know people who just open up Coursera and start listening on commutes, etc - instead of infi-scrolling.
The pedagogical (instruction techniques, content structure, etc) aspect in those vids is different. I wonder if there is inspiration for creators/topics from Coursera?
So I'd be cautious about an app that helps you memorize the contents of said videos. You might end up with a lot of superficial, clickbaity pieces of knowledge.
That's where you'll find actual knowledge and not in high production value videos which have to be financially viable for their creators.
It's hardly a secret that Youtube has a problem funding long form videos with a certain depth and instead favors clickbaity, short material. No reason to be offended.
As a rule of thumb I'd say everything with a sponsored segment is entertainment but too shallow for education.
Perfect list. Tech talks, university lectures (recorded videos) are almost as consumable as YT edu-tainment videos. Papers, books and textbooks are accessible but requires more motivation.
To the parent comment (zadokshi), if YT content is education, why don't the biggest creators make 5-10 videos on a topic, back-to-back? 5-10 is minimum for learning, example Coursera content - I'm not even comparing to semester/yearlong coursework at schools. Because there isn't a demand or incentive for that on YT.
Yes, this is actually something I've been thinking about quite a bit, I actually built out the playlist feature just this morning because it's easier to "show" how Plato works, but I basically just wrote some scripts to get some good enough videos for the demo
If you have any good channel suggestions I'd love to add them :))
One of the things I have on the backburner for now is building a BERT classifier to decide whether the video is Educational, Edu-tainment, or not educational at all and have a more customizable video suggestion than YouTube has (I actually have 2 accounts on YouTube, just so I can watch some random video on 1 without it polluting my education/learning heavy one)
One thing though, is I actually think both have their merit, while I agree the actual educational content is pretty different, the educational entertainment is a nice alternative to TikTok or IG reels when you just want to mindlessly scroll, I think there still often some useful content there, especially if you don't have any background in the area
I'm a bit surprised to only see like 3 questions for a 14 minute video of quantum mechanics. For educational videos with very dense information, is there a way to raise the questions per video rate?
Looking forward to see MIT OpenCourseware videos supported. Right now they are too long :D
Pm me (email in bio) and I can add some MIT OCW videos and turn on support for longer videos to your account
I too often watch these kinds of videos without really retaining a lot. This is a perfect complement to turn infotainment into time well spent, or at least, less wasted.
However, I have recently transitioned towards becoming better at compiling information quickly rather than spending a chunk of my day memorizing facts that I am not quite sure will be useful.
What I'm trying to say is that I rarely go back to the scratchpad of a previous question / problem, but I will approach every question and problem with a new search.
Trying to save information for the sake of it without knowing what future use it is going to have stresses me out, so I find that this fresh scratchpad approach works best for me.
Granted, I’m aware this probably won’t scale to many topics but a few years and hundreds of notes later, it’s still working well for me.
Small bug, the service requires a youtube.com URL and cannot handle an m.youtube.com URL, as happens when copying from a phone web browser or NewPipe. Perhaps you could support the mobile URL as well.
Thanks, great work!
Thanks for catching that! Will fix that!
For example, under 'Physics', we have "The big lie about carbon capture', 'Why (toilet) flushing isn't for everyone', 'The scientific basis for miracles', etc.
One of my future plans is to actually train a BERT model to limit the video suggestions to something that actually is useful instead of clickbait... I have 2 different accounts on YouTube just so watching random videos on 1 won't pollute the suggestions from the other
Any way to self-host to get around the 30 minute video limit?
Pm me (email in bio) and I can enable longer videos for you
I wanted to have a bookmarking site that allows me to add my own time-stamped notes to YouTube videos I watch for learning purposes.
I was using OneNote without any such features.
One note: After submitting a video and answering the questions, the "New Videos to Watch" section appears to be videos similar to the one I uploaded, but may have not been uploaded to PlatoEdu. My expectation was that these were videos others had already uploaded and for which questions had already been generated. So I was surprised when I clicked on one and it started uploading. Had I known it was going to be added I wouldn't have clicked on it, as I'd first want to watch it to verify the content is high quality.
Again, great work. Bookmarked!
Having the user wait for generations was kinda a pain when I was using it myself, but the upload mean that's its now "instant" when you get to questions. I'll try to fix this today or tomorrow!
I'm thinking that it should generate the video content immediately but not add it to your account and instead ask the user.
Duolingo creates dopamine hits under the facade of learning a language (which you never do).
With this, it's fun, and you can actually learn something.
If you're using duolingo as your only source for learning a language, yeah. It's a flashcard app when you get to brass tacks. You won't learn a language by only use flashcards.
As a supplemental tool, it's great.
But some other topics it may be enough for purposes that you would want to use something like Plato for (history, etc)
I think it's kind of similar with Plato, the value you get is going to be really correlated to the quality of videos you put in (I'm working on making the suggestions here be better quality right now too)
But I do think that there is still value to something like Duolingo, if it get's you to do at least a bit of learning over doom scrolling that's a good thing (even if it's much less effective than other methods). I think the problem comes up when something like Duolingo pretends to be better than it is and convinces people that otherwise WOULD be using the better techniques to learn, that's a bad thing, but if it's a replacement to nothing that's probably a net good
(also I actually did use Duolingo to learn German (B1-ish), and it helped as a starting point for vocab and simple grammar, I learned the most with friends and time in Germany but I don't think I would've been able to take advantage of that time without Duolingo... but your milage vary)
I'm not sure wheather my idea works or your work does. I'm also curious about which workaround solve this problem better. You can find ClipMemo on App Store.
I hope you have better luck.
Right now I'm doing this manually by copy/pasting into ChatGPT but I want to automate this aspect. I'm not very technical so any guidance you could provide would be helpful :)
I wanted to build a “yt-campus” with a curated list of educational youtube channels.
This does it better, thank you.
One thing you could consider: allow your community to discuss the video’s. I’ve always wanted to have higher quality discussions about the Engineering videos I watch, and the YouTube comments really disappoint. Would you consider adding that? How about keeping your own personal notes per video?
I'm guessing it only really works well on scripts that are meant to be educational, because there already are "questions" implicit in the transcript of the video because that's the best way to present information when teaching something
Some improvements:
- I tried with a Spanish video, and it told me it didn't have subtitles.
- Would be supper cool to get them exported to Anki! Anyway, shouldn't be difficult to copy and paste it into Anki
> Any particular type of content you’re thinking of?
But for the next version I want to use something called knowledge tracing to determine an estimated level of recall to then change the spacing