Capturing 20 Years of Using YouTube in Chemistry Education

While the YouTube platform is well-known for entertainment, it also hosts hundreds of millions of educational videos. These videos play a role in chemistry education. Students pursue YouTube when they need new modes of representation or to grasp abstract concepts. Instructors use YouTube to supplement their instruction with demonstrations that may not be possible in the classroom. To mark the 20th anniversary of YouTube, we present a systematic literature review across two prominent chemistry education journals to characterize how YouTube has been leveraged. Almost 200 publications were identified as being relevant to this study. Of these, the vast majority discussed using YouTube in a chemistry course (either in the classroom or the laboratory), and more than half used it to replace a regular course activity or function. Moreover, the number of publications describing course practices with YouTube exceeded that of research articles about YouTube videos by a factor of two, with very few manuscripts evaluating the content or quality of the videos. Our findings reinforce YouTube’s prominent role in chemistry education and underscore the need for substantial research to validate its accuracy and efficacy in the classroom, with implications for instructors and future research directions.