YouTube Introduces Ten Innovative Educators As Next EDU Gurus

About a month ago, YouTube announced its Next EDU Guru competition, the latest chapter in the NextUp talent search competition. Next EDU Gurus endeavored to find ten creative educators on YouTube that the video sharing site could throw money at. Now, the winners have been announced, with video professors from several different subjects gaining the support of YouTube. The ten victorious creators are featured in a video released by the YouTube Next Lab, with each one getting some time to talk about what it is he or she does.

One of the first things I noticed about the winning channels is the slight international flavor. Two of the winning channels are from Canada

, with another from the UK. Two other channels focus on giving viewers lessons in Spanish or Japanese. This is not a surprising result, given YouTube’s recent announcement of sixty new Original Channels, most of which are based outside of the US. The choices here continue to reflect YouTube’s growing inclusion of international faces among the channels it backs.

Four of the winning channels are science channels, while two focus on history, two focus on foreign languages, and one focuses on math. ‘But wait!’ I can hear you cry, ‘that only adds up to nine channels!’ Well, I wasn’t exactly sure exactly how to classify Amor Sciendi, a fascinating channel that explains various subjects (including physics, optics, and architecture) by examining classical works of art. Now THAT’S a cool idea. I urge you to check out Amor Sciendi’s video on how The Birth of Venus relates to the golden ratio.

Amor Sciendi’s creator plies his trade as a school teacher, which is surprisingly not a majority among the winners, though several unique educators are included among the chosen few. The homeschooled father/son combo is a particlarly funky teaching setup, but what intrigued me more was how one of the winners is a biology teacher from Montana, the same state that educator Hank Green of CrashCourse and the Vlogbrothers hails from. Will one of these EDU Guru’s end up on the president’s blog? They’ll certainly have plenty of training and exposure. Maybe a Twitter shout out is more realistic.

Hop on over to YouTube, check out all of the winners, and try to not melt your brain with all of that learning.