Abstract:

In the contemporary digital media industry, the need to offer new audiovisual products to children systematically has pushed the production of many contents under an educational label without accurately assessing neither their quality nor their cognitive, social, or pedagogical effects (Blumberg, Brooks, Powers & Marcial, 2017). Consequently, these objects cannot ensure effective learning nor a safe learning environment, thus raising several concerns and skepticism among the medical community and families (Courage, 2017). As children are shifting more and more from traditional channels, such as television, to online video streaming platforms, such as YouTube, in these times of convergence between media channels (Ponte, 2012), these concerns become of great importance.

The YouTube team, for instance, which is currently migrating content from YouTube to YouTube Kids and promoting its use, is selecting the content to migrate departing from the collection of metadata provided by the creators, and using machine learning to identify which videos are adequate for children based on criteria such as if the videos contain kid’s characters, themes, toys or games, which is clearly insufficient to ensure the quality of the videos. In fact, on YouTube and YouTube Kids, the role of the broadcast programmer is played by an algorithm that does not necessarily select what is of good quality instead of what is only appealing. In order to solve this problem, it is needed an increasing media literacy from the families, and this is a process that takes time. Therefore, good quality products have to be ensured from the beginning, and as Fisch (2017) posits, this can happen if researchers and producers collaborate in the creation of good content for children.

With this context in mind, in this presentation it is aimed:
(1) to present the preliminary results of a research project on what should be the adequate characteristics of educational videos targeted at pre-school children (3-5 years old), in order to make them appealing and engaging to viewers, adequate for their cognitive development, and providing an effective and safe learning environment; and
(2) to present a project of applied research into the creation and distribution on YouTube of an original educational product – a five-episode series about music education targeted at preschool children (3-5 years old).

References:
[1] Blumberg, F. C., Brooks, P. J., Powers, K. L. & Marcial, C. (2017). Media Use as a Context for Cognitive Development: What is and Should be Known?. F. C. Blumberg & P. J. Brooks (eds.) Cognitive Development in Digital Contexts. Academic Press, Kindle Edition.
[2] Courage, M. L. (2017). Screen Media and the Youngest Viewers: Implications for Attention and Learning”. F. C. Blumberg & P. J. Brooks (eds). Cognitive Development in Digital Contexts. Academic Press, Kindle Edition.
[3] Fisch, S. M. (2017). Bridging Theory & Practice: Applying Cognitive and Educational Theory to the Design of Educational Media. F. Blumberg & P. J. Brooks (eds.). Cognitive Development in Digital Contexts. Academic Press, Kindle Edition.
[4] Ponte, C. (2012). Crianças & media: pesquisa internacional e contexto português do século XIX à atualidade. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais.

Keywords:

Educational videos for pre-school children, cognitive development and educational media, digital media and cognition, audiovisual products for children.