Abstract

YouTube as a source of instructional videos for teaching clinical examination skills

Author(s): ieran Kennedy, Brian Stewart, Gloria Avalos

The application of YouTube to undergraduate medical education has not been explored in the literature. We describe the popularity and quality of videos relating to clinical examination of the cardiovascular system that are available to medical students through the online video-repository. Videos were independently graded by two expert assessors. The popularity of each video was then estimated. The average score for the accuracy of the cardiovascular examination in all videos was found to be only 43%. There was only moderate correlation between video popularity and assessors’ scores. There was a moderate correlation between the assessors’ scores and viewers’ positive rankings, but no correlation with negative rankings. The absence of strong correlation between video popularity and the assessors’ findings suggests that users of the website are not always able to discriminate between videos of low and high educational value. However, if high quality videos are identified to students, YouTube could be a useful educational tool.