Many students who might want to go to college face barriers. They don’t know how to apply. They’re not sure how much it will cost. They’re afraid of taking on debt. Arizona State University hopes its new partnership with YouTube and an edutainment-production company called Complexly will encourage those students to give college a try.
They can go on YouTube and try out college courses through Study Hall, a channel that hosts free educational videos produced by ASU and Complexly. A student who pays $25 for a companion ASU course unlocks a Google Classroom with readings, textbooks, peer discussions, and access to ASU instructors. After the final exam, if they’re satisfied with their grade, students can pay $400 for transferable college credit.
Study Hall’s channel has had at least 6.2 million views and has 100,000 subscribers. According to Wayne Anderson, senior director of EdPlus at ASU, the program has nearly 10,000 students who have signed up for a Study Hall course.
The extent to which it offers a viable path toward college is in the eye of the beholder, however.
The idea for Study Hall dates back to 2019, when a conversation between Complexly and ASU took place at an invitation-only YouTube event called EduCon. Anderson met one of the founders of Complexly, John Green, and his wife, Sarah, over lunch, and they talked about the rising trend of creators teaching via the YouTube platform. Green and his brother, Hank, started making educational content on YouTube back in 2007, which led to Crash Course and other educational-content ventures. Crash Course now has 15.7 million subscribers and regularly releases free high-school and AP-level video lectures.
Sean Hobson, chief design officer with EdPlus at ASU, said the two organizations joined forces because Complexly knows how to engage YouTube learners and ASU understands how to work with faculty members, instructional designers, and ed-tech experts to design curricula.
Julie Walsh Smith, chief executive of Complexly, said it was daunting for the company to work with a university “because we see a lot of problems with the barriers to higher education.” But the company saw a good partner in ASU because of its history in online learning and desire to democratize access to higher ed.
Ryan Meuth, an associate teaching professor in Academic and Student Affairs at the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU, designed the “Code and Programming for Beginners” course. He said that in March the class on Study Hall had approximately 1,800 students.
Meuth said he redesigned ASU’s freshman programming courses to offer the same quality of education across all formats and applied that principle to the Study Hall version. “Every student that takes this intro class, either through Study Hall or ASU Online or hybrid, gets almost exactly the same experience,” he said. “The only real difference between them is whether or not there are in-person meetings for class.”
Complexly uses a mix of trained professors and content creators to host the video lectures and attract audiences to Study Hall. Meuth’s programming class was hosted by Sabrina Cruz, a rising YouTube star thanks to her channel Answer in Progress. The “Power and Politics in U.S. Government” course was hosted by Dave Jorgenson, Carmella Boykin, and Chris Vazquez, producers of The Washington Post’s TikTok channel.
Some of the internet personalities who host courses are already professors. Danielle Bainbridge, an assistant professor at Northwestern University and host of PBS’s YouTube series Origin of Everything, also hosts Study Hall’s “U.S. History to 1865” course. She started using digital media in her fifth year of graduate school.
“I found academic writing sometimes to be kind of stifling. … I also had frustration with the fact that most of the writing I was doing was behind paywalls. So most people couldn’t access it or really learn from it,” she said.
But for Bainbridge, making videos isn’t just about putting her work out for the public to see. “I also think it really encourages me as an educator to be clear in my ideas and communication because I’m explaining things to a wide array of people,” she said. “When I’m in front of my students I still utilize those same skills of, how can I explain this? How can I make this exciting for my students? How can I craft greater meaning from this work? So I think it kind of has a cross-pollination.”
Uncharted Waters
As Bainbridge sees it, institutions wanting to replicate programs like Study Hall could train faculty members interested in using digital media or form partnerships with established internet personalities. But colleges may find themselves stranded in uncharted waters.
In November 2022, East Carolina University announced it would collaborate with Jimmy Donaldson, known on YouTube as MrBeast, to make a credentialing program for aspiring content creators. MrBeast, the announcement explained, has built his company’s reputation on “spectacles, philanthropy, general good, and in-real-life comedy of family-friendly content” — perhaps not as obvious a match for higher ed as the Green brothers. Since that announcement, no developments have been made public.
In response to questions about the project, the university emailed a statement saying that “ECU and the MrBeast team continue the work of developing curriculum for this program and are not able to provide further specifics at this time.”
Rachel Fishman, director of the higher education program at New America, advises colleges to be cautious when making contracts with companies for video content, just as they should be when working with online program managers. As colleges seek to increase enrollments, they may end up overcompensating their partners, she said.
“Institutions should consider the contracts they enter into and the transparency to students about who is providing the education and the data usage,” Fishman said.
Does Study Hall deliver on its promise to broaden access to higher education? Fishman said the cost of credit was affordable compared with other options, but she added a caveat. “This is a somewhat affordable way for students to get credits, and they only have to pay at the end, which is good. But they aren’t enrolled in the institution, they don’t know how those credits will be received elsewhere, and they have to front the $400. Students would have to front this money because none of this will be covered by Title IV.”
Measuring Success
The pass rate may not look stellar at first blush: Of the students who pay to take a Study Hall course and submit at least one assignment, 19 to 42 percent of them pass, depending on course topic. But Anderson and Hobson contrasted it with the pass rate for traditional massive open online courses, or MOOCs, which can hover in the single digits. They stressed that the intent of Study Hall’s model is unique.
“Many students say ‘I’m trying to see if college is right for me,’ or ‘if I’m capable of learning at a college course level,’” said Anderson. Better to test that in Study Hall than to have a $2,000 bill when they find out, he said.
“They can [leave] and the only real risk they’ve taken is the $25,” Hobson said. “It’s a feature of the design.”
But Fishman argued that for students trying to see if college is right for them, doing so through an online program so similar to a massive open online course might do more harm than good. “Education is supposed to be more than just a sage on the stage, which is what that free model is,” Fishman said.
And she said the pathway from Study Hall to college is invisible. “Do these classes build to anything? If someone paid $400 for all of these would ASU say you’re halfway to an associate degree or a certificate that’s stackable?” Fishman asked.
Hobson said that is the strength of Study Hall. It doesn’t have to lead the student into college unless they want it to. It was designed to be a low-cost, low-risk learning space.
Meuth agrees. “I got an email from a student who took ‘Coding for Beginners’ because they needed a refresher to prepare for a program they were enrolling in at a different college. And I count that as a success because it served that student’s needs. There’s lots of ways we measure success and it’s not just whether they enrolled at ASU. That’s why I keep going back to this. It helps a lot of people in a lot of ways that doesn’t necessarily get addressed by the university system as it currently is,” he said.
Anonymized comments from students in Study Hall, provided to The Chronicle by ASU, make similar points. One student said medical problems prevented them from committing to college, and that Study Hall was a much cheaper way to start their education. Another student said they wanted to model to their children that a college education was attainable, so they used Study Hall to test whether they could learn at the college level. And another student was taking a gap year after high school and was using Study Hall as a way to keep their skills fresh.
How does ASU finance Study Hall? Hobson would say only that the university had invested “significant resources.”
Meuth confirmed that he was paid for his work on Study Hall on top of his usual work for ASU. The university plans to reinvest any revenue from the channel and course fees back into the program, Hobson said, and supplement that with philanthropy, if needed.
Hobson hopes the channel continues to grow. He sees it as a place for the university to experiment with technology and new pedagogy, and as a potential avenue for ASU to connect with “that population in high school who are looking to make decisions about college.”
“We’ve learned a lot about how to serve a learner who is looking to YouTube as a primary or secondary source for learning,” he said. “That is an invaluable skill set for an institution.”
