YouTube has long been embedded in students’ everyday lives, but its widespread presence does not automatically make it an educational tool. This is the starting point of YouTube as a Cyber-Classroom: A Critical Review of Its Pedagogical Use in Ibero-American Higher Education, by Ana María Beltrán-Flandoli, Amor Pérez-Rodríguez, and Julio-César Mateus.
The article examines how the platform has been incorporated into Ibero-American higher education and reveals a more complex picture than the simple viewing of videos. YouTube is used to introduce and reinforce content, produce audiovisual materials, stimulate debate, conduct research, assess learning, and develop personal learning environments. The pandemic accelerated these practices, particularly in undergraduate education, but it also revealed the extent to which many of them represented emergency adaptation rather than mature pedagogical integration.
The review analyses 23 studies published between 2015 and 2021, selected through searches in Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. This perspective reveals a remarkable variety of uses, disciplines, and methodologies, while also highlighting several problematic tendencies: the predominance of perception questionnaires, studies focused on technology acceptance, and individual experiences whose findings are difficult to generalise.
The article’s value lies precisely in its refusal to equate satisfaction with learning. The fact that students and teachers perceive YouTube as accessible, motivating, or useful does not in itself demonstrate that it promotes deep understanding. The platform acquires genuine educational value when students do more than watch: when they compare sources, analyse discourses, create content, justify their decisions, and assess videos according to criteria of reliability.
The review’s main conclusion is that innovation does not reside in the tool itself, but in the pedagogical mediation constructed around it. YouTube can become a cyber-classroom, but it can also remain a mere repository of materials or an audiovisual extension of lecture-based teaching. The authors identify several important shortcomings, including limited attention to inequalities of access, disparities in the ability to use the platform pedagogically, information literacy, and cultural and institutional constraints.
For this reason, the article is particularly valuable as a call to move beyond an instrumental view of technology. Rather than merely asking whether YouTube works at university, it invites us to examine what it is used for, what kinds of intellectual activity it generates, and what training teachers need to transform audiovisual consumption into a critical, participatory, and genuinely educational experience.
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How to Cite: Beltrán-Flandoli, A. M., Pérez-Rodríguez, A., & Mateus, J.-C. (2023). YouTube as a Cyber-Classroom. Critical Review of its Pedagogical Use at Ibero-American University. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 26(1), 287–306. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.26.1.34372
