Narrowing the research

Hello,

I really liked the videos and articles you have posted so far, they seem to be quite useful. Sorry for not taking part in the brainstorming proccess, I will make up for it in the following sections, since we seem to have ran out of time for random ideas (regardless of how good they are).

Before heading to find our direction with this research, I would also like to add a language teaching video from Youtube.

This is the first, introductory part of Misterduncan's series of English teaching videos. He has posted 67 videos so far, with varying length but usually around quarter of an hour per each. He seems to be posting a new teaching video every week.

I think it was important for us to get a grasp about how these different english teaching videos are present in Youtube. However, if we type in the keywords "english learning" on Youtube, it gives us eighty thousands videos as a result; and we don't have an easier case with "english teaching" either, because it presents sixty thousands of videos.

The most important question now is how to narrow down and continue with our topic. I have a proposal which might seem viable, so I hope you will read it by tomorrow and we can discuss it in class.

We obviously can't examine a lot of teaching videos, although I think these are the best material
to base the research on. What we can do, though, is to select 3 or 4 (3 might be better, because then each of us will have a separate subject) representative models of ELT video-series on Youtube, such as Misterduncan or Ausztrál Tom (the latter might not be that good of an example, but I am only proposing ideas which we can further evolve together). After selecting the videoseries which we could examine, we should put up the framework of the research - that is, which questions do we raise, which lines do we go along and what is the result we'd like to achieve both in the case of the individual series and both in the comparison of these series at the end.

To avoid being too vague again, I was thinking about questions like the following ones:

- The popularity of the selected series - how many people watched them. The answer will be more representative in the case of series, because we can draw conclusions about how many people regularly follow the lessons and benefit from them. I think it would be really interesting to examine the comments of the learners if we have time for that, too.

- The teaching methods and guidelines of the teachers in general.

- The target group and the aim of the teachers (e.g. common conversational things for the sake of tourists or advanced level teaching).

- The nationality and dialect of the teachers.

- And most importantly, the usage of the assets offered by online teaching, and in particular, how they gain advantages of the video teaching and the Youtube platform itself. Such important concepts as tagging, subtitling and so on should be further extended in this part.

If we can agree on a set of questions and aspects by which we examine the teaching series, we will have a quite accurate and broad consideration of them both individually and in respect to one another. At this point, we will be able to draw a comparison among them, and reach a conclusion (like how and why are they useful, creative, and so on - we will have enough data for this) and a final result of the research.

It is just a proposal and I am far from being sure whether it is good or not, but it is something we can discuss and evolve together, and it may be a good lead to a useful direction - or I hope so, because we need to find one. Anyway, I am sure we can make a sensible project regardless of using these ideas or not.

Thanks for considering this. :)

Erika