Viewer comments as educational annotation in video content sharing sites

Although online video sharing sites are often viewed as contributors to a decline in students’ reading, these sites may also have the potential to enhance learning. Content sharing sites that contain viewer comments along with thought-provoking video lecture may provide a particularly rich source of instructional materials. To explore this potential, four discussion forums from the TED website were analysed at two levels. The first level provided a description of the types of comments that were prevalent in the discussion and indicated that clarifications, interpretations, and question were the most common types of substantive posts. The second level used Cognitive Flexibility Theory as a framework, and found that these forums contained open, expansive comments that could counteract common categories of oversimplification. These results suggest that freely available websites such as TED contain materials that could facilitate learning while capitalising on the intrinsic appeal of videos and social media.