Crash Course is heading to college.
Starting March 31, Hank and John Green’s flagship educational YouTube channel–which has nearly 11 million subscribers–began releasing a new weekly series, called Study Hall, in partnership with Arizona State University (ASU).
“We know that learning happens in a lot of different ways on a lot of different platforms, and YouTube is a big part of that,” Hank says in the series’ introduction video (below). “Our goal with Study Hall is simple: we want to help as many people as possible be successful in their education, whether you’re a current student and you want to fill some gaps before going back to school, or you just want to learn for fun.”
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Unlike many digital education resources, including YouTube’s own recently-launched Learn@Home hub, Study Hall is aimed at a college-age audience. Accordingly, the Green brothers and Crash Course staff are working with professors at ASU to offer courses in writing composition, algebra, chemistry, and data literacy, EdSurge reports.
As with all Crash Course content (and content from the Greens’ other educational channels), Study Hall is free and available for anyone to watch.
Crash Course and ASU came together at one of YouTube’s EduCon gatherings, John told EdSurge. He added that Crash Course had considered partnering with other colleges in the past, because videos about complex topics geared toward higher education students aren’t common on YouTube. But it ultimately went with ASU because of the university’s focus on “who can we make part of the story of postsecondary education, instead of how we can be the most elite, lowest-acceptance-rate college in the world,” he said.
To be clear, Study Hall was arranged before the pandemic, and was already planned for release around this time. But the Greens do expect to see more people tuning in now that thousands of schools are closed and millions of students of all ages are spending more time at home. They’ve already seen an increase in views for Crash Course’s previously uploaded videos, according to John.
“Really, we hope that during a time that’s very difficult for everyone, it can be a resource that’s reliable and accessible and helpful,” he said.
You can find all Study Hall episodes in this playlist.
