YouTube as an Educational Resource in Medical Education: A Scoping Review (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Video has been a powerful teaching and learning tool in medical education, enabling knowledge, skill and attitude formation in a variety of areas and reaching learners with various learning and communication styles. The millennial generation has grown up with video at their fingertips at any time and any place, and social networking sites such as YouTube enable the sharing of video amongst a vast online community. YouTube has emerged as a growing educational resource for both learners and medical educators. However, the usefulness of YouTube in supporting teaching and learning across the continuum of medical education has not been explored in detail. Given the increasing usage of YouTube in medical education, a review of the literature on YouTube and its utilization in medical education could inform more effective adoption and usage by institutions, educators, practitioners and learners. OBJECTIVE To explore the use of YouTube across the medical education continuum. METHODS A scoping review of the literature was performed. PubMed, ERIC and CINAHL were searched for literature on YouTube usage for medical education purposes published between 2005 and 2017 using a combination of search terms. Articles were screened using a defined set of inclusion criteria. Key items of information from each paper were collated using a data extraction tool and common themes from the literature were identified via thematic analysis. RESULTS Of the 113 articles initially identified in the literature search, 31 met inclusion criteria. Results show that a large number of YouTube videos exist across a variety of medical topic areas. However, only a small number of studies have evaluated the effectiveness of YouTube as an educational intervention and these are largely limited to learner satisfaction only. YouTube does offer the opportunity for educators to share videos and for learners to access a wide array of video materials. However, a majority of studies involving the assessment of content quality suggest that YouTube videos may be an inadequate source of information for learning due to the high variability of content. A key limitation in many of these studies was that searches were mainly restricted to publicly available video content. CONCLUSIONS There is a paucity of research and evaluative work surrounding the use of YouTube as an educational resource across the medical education continuum. The quality of the content on YouTube is highly variable due to a lack of peer-review. Further evaluation of the effective integration of YouTube in medical education would inform further understanding and future practice.