PERToY - A YouTube Channel for PER

Martin Stein, Cornell University

During the FFPER conference 2019 in Bar Harbor, Maine, we discussed possibilities to make more talks on Physics Education Research available online. I initiated the discussion out of a perceived need to share more ideas between different research groups: As a (now third-year) graduate student I still grapple with the interdisciplinary nature of PER. Reading papers from other research groups, it is often hard to understand the researchers’ background or the assumptions and commitments that their research is based on. It is often hard to read between the lines of a peer-reviewed publication and to figure out what a researcher is telling us with their paper. Some of these barriers are reduced in conference talks, allowing researchers to use more informal language, give more background information, and focus on more than one study. This was especially obvious in FFPER’s out-of-the-box talks in which several speakers brought forward visionary ideas spanning multiple studies and large research projects. Yet most such talks are only heard once and only by the people with the privilege of being in the room at the time. Recording talks could preserve them for the future and make them available to a much larger audience.

The idea of recording talks to make them available online to a larger audience resonated well with other graduate students at FFPER. We discussed the advantages of such recordings and proposals to realize this idea in a working group of several graduate students. We concluded that recording talks online does not only make scientific work more accessible intellectually, but also makes work in PER accessible to researchers or practitioners who cannot attend a conference talk. Most of us can think of several reasons to not attend a conference talk: It might be health, a lack of funding, an interesting parallel session, or environmental concerns of flying to multiple conferences a year, potentially internationally.

We drafted a vision of how our ideas might be implemented. The first stage of our project would simply tap into existing resources with the lowest effort possible: We hope to start by recording, collecting, and uploading talks that are given on conferences and colloquia nationally. We thought of two ways of achieving this goal: First, if we could collect consent from speakers, we could make a wide range of talks given at AAPT meetings and PERCs accessible to the PER community online by using graduate student volunteers who can use their cell phones or cameras to record talks they attend. To streamline getting access from speakers at these conferences, we pitched our idea to AAPT executives during the AAPT 2019 summer meeting town hall. We hope to be able to include a consent form in the abstract submission process for talks at AAPT/PERC. The idea was conceived well and we are in contact with AAPT executives to discuss options for the next summer meeting.

The feasibility of recording a conference is demonstrated by some conferences that already record the majority of the talks given through “crowdsourcing”--having volunteers record the sessions with their mobile phones. For example the Evolution meeting by the American Society of Naturalists started recording their conference talks a few years ago. The conference’s Youtube Channel for the 2017 edition with 1,700 attendees had about 26,000 video views on 367 videos. We believe that if for example an AAPT summer meeting with a similar size of around 1,200 attendees achieves a similar number of recorded talks and views, our mission has been a success already.

A second possibility to record conference talks would be after the conference by sending out solicitations to speakers to record their talk using screen-recording software. Software is freely available and easy to use, for example Zoom and Skype have this functionality. We piloted this option by sending solicitations to some speakers we personally knew at the AAPT summer meeting this year.

Whatever way the videos end up being recorded, the simplest possibility to make them widely available would be to upload them to a YouTube channel we created: PERToY - Physics Education Research Talks on YouTube. We created a sample video to show how such a recording could look like.

As a second stage of our project, we hope to provide a managed and moderated platform with quality standards and control. Thereby we could ensure the quality of uploaded talks, checking for good audio and video quality, synchronizing slides and a video of the speaker, and providing supplemental information on the talk (abstracts, links to papers, etc.) Ideally, this would also increase international visibility of the platform, hopefully inviting contributions from international conferences, and allowing the PER community to share ideas more easily internationally. To maintain such a platform, we would probably need external funding at this stage of the project.

As a third stage in our project, we envision going beyond recording talks that are given anyway and creating original content. We were inspired by individuals and some journals that create podcasts alongside publications already. In podcasts, we could provide unique insights into personalities and work in the PER community and come closest to the career-spanning and visionary talks that inspired this project in the first place.

We want to thank the FFPER conference organizers for connecting us and providing the space to discuss such ideas. We hope that in return our project will help connect the PER community more and allow researchers to more informally exchange ideas.

Working Group members:

Martin Stein (Cornell University)
Brianna Santangelo (North Dakota State University)
Cole Walsh (Cornell University)
Lisa Goodhew (University of Washington)
Bor Gregorčič (Uppsala University)
William Riihiluoma (University of Maine)
Elias Euler (Uppsala University)

Martin Stein is a graduate student in the Cornell Discipline-based Education Research group (CDER).

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.