A Portion Of My "Origin Story": Starting Out Producing YouTube Videos

how I ended up becoming a teacher for people all over the world, without ever intending to do so!

Last week I made a guest appearance on Michael Burns’ livestreaming show (you can watch the session here), and I told a story that I have narrated a number of times. It’s something I get asked about pretty frequently on podcasts and shows, particularly when people want to know about my “philosophical origin story”, specifically the portion that has to do with my starting my YouTube channel.

I don’t think I’ve written it down, though I have related it many times, and it is a really good story in my view, so perhaps it’s about time I set it down in print. It also has the added bonus of making my wife and partner, Andi, look quite good due to the role she played, so that’s a rather self-interested reason on my part to tell it to you.

My work producing and uploading YouTube videos started back in 2010, but didn’t really take off in earnest until 2011. Andi bought me a flipcam that was intended for me to use to record my summer trip with my children, and in fall of that year, I used it to record a few of the conference presentations I made (I think the only one I have still is this one on Plato's Dialogues and Active Learning).

In spring 2011, I was teaching my final semester at Fayetteville State University. Andi and I had plans for me to move up to New York, where we would build a full life together, once the spring semester was finished. She suggested that I start videorecording my class sessions, and uploading them to YouTube. I was initially a bit skeptical about that idea. When it comes to technology, Andi is an early adopter who foresees and enjoys potentials new tech might provide, while I am temperamentally more conservative when it comes to trying or incorporating new things.

I had already been videorecorded once teaching a class session, as part of a faculty development seminar I participated in during the 2009-2010 academic year. Our Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) had one of the techs come in with a massive camera to one of my Critical Thinking classes, during which I was teaching about inductive argumentation and inference. It was part of an experiment that they envisioned producing records that could go into our portfolios for promotion and tenure.

What Andi proposed was something much more DIY, low-tech, and flexible. She ordered me a little tripod the flipcam would sit upon, and the idea was that I would record one of my class sessions, and then upload the video file as a resource for my students. That semester, I was teaching four sections of the same class, Introduction To Critical Thinking (a 100-level class required for all students at FSU), and we covered the same materials in each of the class sections, so recording just one of those class sessions each day would prove useful for all of the sections.

I was initially reluctant, but Andi can be quite persuasive (not least because she is both smarter than me and arguably a better communicator), and conviced me to give it a try. There was quite literally nothing to lose by recording the class sessions. I could keep them just for my classes, or share them with the public — that was up to me. I scoffed at the idea of putting them out there on the internet, asking who would possibly want to watch me, an academic unknown (except in a very few small circles), teaching students at a small southern HBCU few people had heard of.

Interestingly, one reason why my lectures from that Critical Thinking class ended up on YouTube in the first place was that the course management system we were using at the time, Blackboard, could not handle video uploads longer than just a few minutes. My class sessions generally ran around 45-50 minutes, depending on how quickly we got going in class. I couldn’t even upload them into my own personal YouTube channel at that time, since back then YouTube allowed only 10 minute, then 15 minute, and then 20 minute video uploads.

They did, however, make an exception for “institutional” channels, and university channels fell under that classification. So after class, I would download the raw video of the class session onto my office computer, place it into a shared drive, and then one of the IT people would take that file and upload it into FSU’s own YouTube channel. Then, I’d provide that link in Blackboard to my students. That institutional channel is where all of those 2011 Critical Thinking videos are still hosted (you can find them in this playlist)

I also recorded other videos at the time, including two guest lectures in colleague’s classes, more conference presentations, a National Library Week talk on my recent book (which I remastered), and a series of short videos I called “Dr Sadler’s Chalk and Talk”. By the time the spring semester ended, and I was getting ready to leave FSU and move up to be with Andi in New York, YouTube began allowing individual users to upload longer videos.

The comments that I got on the various videos were very revealing, and brought me to see the truth of some things that Andi had been saying to me all along. While there were a few trolls and pedants (there always are), for the most part they were quite positive.

A number of people thanked me for uploading the lectures, which they found very helpful, not least because they were having difficulties in their own classes, and their instructors were not providing them with support, explanations, examples, or applications of the concepts.

Many other people were grateful for uploading the class session recordings, and for quite a few of them, the fact that they were college classes in a classroom with a chalkboard was important. Some said that they either couldn’t afford higher education or that they had, for a variety of reasons, to stop attending college or university. Others said that they had graduated from college some time ago, and missed getting to go to classes, and the videos gave them the feeling of being back in school.

Quite a few other people asked questions about the concepts and distinctions we discussed, or about the examples I was using (some from the course text, others made up by me or my students on the spot). Viewers responded to each other occasionally as well, engaging in some side-conversations.

After I left Fayetteville State University (and that’s a long story which I can tell another time), and moved in with Andi up in the Hudson Valley in New York, I started teaching as an adjunct, this time for Marist College. At that time, they required two philosophy classes for their traditional on-campus students, a 100-level Introduction to Philosophy course and a 300-level Ethics course. In Fall 2011, I was slated to teach one section of each.

I asked the department chair whether she would have any objection to me recording my classes and uploading the videos to my YouTube channel, and she was fine with it, even interested in seeing what I was doing, and how the videos could be used as resources for students. Since the students’ voices would be on the videos (though rarely their images, unless they passed in front of the camera), I explained what educational purposes were served by videorecording the class sessions, and had them sign a FERPA release.

So I uploaded the videos, in rather raw form, that first semester. We met generally twice per week for those classes, so that gave me a good bit of video content to upload and for people to watch, share, and comment upon. And they did. My own students watched the videos sometimes embedded in our course management system, but they ended up as the proverbial drop in the bucket compared to the sizable and growing viewership of students, lifelong learners, and even fellow professors all over the world.

As opposed to the Critical Thinking class, where I was just leading students through a textbook, supplemented by some resources I developed for them, the Marist classes I got to choose what texts I would focus upon and have the students study. I’m a big believer that given proper support, undergraduate students can productively read primary texts in philosophy, so across these two classes, they read a range of thinkers.

These included Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Epictetus, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, Jeremy Bentham, Immanual Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, John Stuart Mill, Virgina Held, and Alasdair MacIntyre. So by the start of 2012, I had videos recorded in class on works by each of those, which then could be reused as course resources for new classes.

You can see the videos from those two classes, expanded a good bit by the addition of later semesters’ videos, in these two playlists:

• A Course In Ethics

• Introduction To Philosophy

The following semester, I taught Ethics again, two in-person sections of it this time, and I decided to mix up the schedule a bit, not least so that I could teach and record class sessions on additional texts and thinkers. I added in some W.D. Ross, Jean-Paul Sartre, Rosemarie Tong to the curriculum, all of which I recorded videos on. I also was asked to pilot an online 12-week Ethics class that semester, in which I used those class lecture and discussion videos as one main component of the resources I supplied my online students with.

Once again, as I put out more of the videos, people all over the world watched and (mostly) enjoyed them, commented on them, shared them. I even had other professors start using them as resources for their own students. As the semesters went on, and I taught more Ethics and Intro to Philosophy courses (and then eventually Religion In American Culture and World Views and Values courses for Marist, I kept adding those recordings to the stock in my channel. Over those several early years, I gathered a rather vocal and appreciative following and got a reputation as a reliable and engaging online lecturer.

There’s more to say about the early years of my YouTube channel and online presence, but that’s probably about enough for the moment, I think. If readers are interested in this back-history, I’ll write out more fully some additional portions of the story in the months ahead.

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Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.