YouTube As an FAQ Platform?
By Joshua Kim June 1, 2010 9:56 pm
We make tons of screencasts for our FAQ pages. Voice-over screencasts are great ways to show people how to accomplish tasks in the LMS, on the Web, or in specialized applications. A movie is no substitute for good step-by-step directions, as many people would prefer to have the steps written out for them to follow. But as screencasting is much faster, and in these days of unlimited demands and limited time, having a screencast available is better than not having anything. (The gold standard is to have both a screencast and step-by-step instructions).
The question is where should these screencasts live? The most common practice is to put links to the screencast movies on a dedicated support page that is linked off of the LMS or academic technology pages. These pages are almost always open to non-institutional users (do not require authentication), and are sometimes findable by Googling.
I'm wondering if it makes sense to publish "help" screencasts to YouTube? Maybe preserve the links on the FAQ page, but have them point to YouTube as opposed to local media servers. You can see an example of what this would look like for
this quick screencast I did on
