Educational references during the COVID-19 pandemic: The success of the edutubers

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic provided a need for telematic education due to the confinement of the population and the physical space of educational institutions. In this way, the list of teachers and educators has been transformed into its methodological dimension in an abrupt way so that it can use different open platforms in which to share and use educational resources. During this period, the edutubers (creators of educational audiovisual content on YouTube) positioned themselves as referents for formal education, as well as for the formal and informal education. Hence the importance of an investigation into this reality with a high impact on the current education in which the subscribers of their YouTube channels and the visualizations of their educational content are counted by millions. The objective of the study is to highlight the factors of success of the educators whose channels can be considered a reference in the educational field. Through the application of an instrument validated with reliability and consistency corroborated by the V coefficient of Aiken and the alpha of Cronbach (α =.83), the following categories are analyzed statistics of YouTube channels, structuring of videos, process of recording and editing, personality of the edutuber, use of the YouTube platform and use of other social networks. The results show trends and success factors for educators in each of the categories analyzed, in line with other investigations at the international level. The conclusions of the research carried out have a series of content and digital competences that are proposed as the basis for an effective training of the teacher about the creation and the use of audiovisual content in a face-to-face education as well as in a telematic education chosen as methodological option or as necessary. © 2021 University of Granada. All rights reserved.