Qualitative Assessment of the Educational Use of an Electrical Engineering YouTube Channel

Abstract

Engineering undergraduates face some specific challenges during their studies, such as an intense presence of abstract concepts in their subjects as well as the inability to connect different technical subjects into the big picture of the degree. This is also common to other STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines. Multimedia resources as a complement to education present benefits that might help increasing students motivation and performance. This research focuses on YouTube as a source for those resources, presenting a qualitative analysis of the educational use of an electrical engineering channel, through the evaluation of its audience perceptions. A total of 524 open participations have been collected, coded, and analyzed. Exploratory and cooccurrences analyses show a predominant use of these videos for understanding and gaining knowledge, considering them interesting and of good quality. This study confirms that subjective perception from the channel's audience is mainly positive for its integration in pedagogical processes.