YouTube as an Instrument of Learning in Higher Education: Opportunities and Challenges

Fashion for using video resources of the Internet and especially YouTube in the educational process is becoming more and more noticeable in universities and colleges around the world. Perhaps, there is nothing strange in this trend. Contemporary students are used to spending a lot of time on the Internet every day. Besides, it is true, that YouTube contains a significant amount of useful information for learning. This information is presented on various popular science and educational channels. So, using YouTube allows students to get through the learning process in a familiar and comfortable form. Therefore, the trend for using YouTube resources in the educational process is hardly surprising. But an understanding of the true opportunities of using YouTube in this area still needs clarification. Is there a real need to use YouTube in the education process? What are the specific opportunities of it's use in education? And what are the challenges of it's use in education? This paper is devoted to the description of the research, which was started by the authors for clarification of these complicated questions. The initial goal of the research is to clarify the specific opportunities and risks of using of YouTube as an instrument of learning in higher education. The authors focus their interest on the analysis of a particular case of using YouTube resources in the educational process at the Ural Federal University (Ekaterinburg, Russia) during one educational cycle in the 2019 academic year. The authors rely on several research methods: sociological survey, discourse-analysis and content-analysis. The authors not only describe specific examples of using video content from YouTube for solving educational tasks, but also to analyze in detail the students' reaction to the use of such content. The key hypothesis of the research is that the potential benefits of using YouTube resources in the educational process are significantly overvalued. YouTube is useful as an auxiliary and illustrative source, but its excessive use in the educational process does not match with the needs of students and leads to a decrease in the quality of education.