Today, Khan Academy has 15m registered students in 190 countries. The YouTube channel has racked up over 500m views. Khan’s vision for the future has been endorsed by everyone from Bill Gates to Barack Obama; he’s working with institutions like Stanford University and the Tate.

While Khan is perhaps YouTube’s biggest success in the field of learning, the platform is saturated with instructional videos. There are YouTube tutorials for changing a light bulb, assembling baby buggies, learning the guitar. Shawn Mendes, the 16-year-old Canadian singer hailed as the “next Justin Bieber” taught himself guitar entirely via YouTube.

It’s easy to see the appeal: instead of puzzling over an instruction manual written in 15 languages, you can just watch someone show you. “Our toilet got stuck the other day,” Khan tells me. “Normally, you would hire a plumber. But I watched a YouTube video, which said this was a case where you need an auger – I’d never heard of that – and I went to the hardware store and bought one and I was able to fix it.”

2019-09-20: The YouTube revolution in knowledge transfer

Through these videos, learners can now partially replicate the master-apprentice relationship, opening up skill domains and economic niches that were previously cordoned off by personal access. These new points of access range from the specialized trades, where electricians illustrate how to use multimeters and how to assess breaker boxes, to less specialized domestic activities, where a novice can learn basic knife-handling techniques from an expert. YouTube reports that searches in the “how-to” category has grown 70% year-on-year.

2022-02-01: For me, the way Sandy Munroe and crew break down vehicles to explain the engineering tradeoffs is a great tacit knowledge example. I could never have guessed that i’d enjoy engineering breakdowns of a Tesla, but these videos are now some of my favorites.

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