YouTube has long been a source of educational videos, how-to and tutorials available to the masses. You could learn to play the ukulele, peel an onion or even teach yourself programming. At present, YouTube monitors and moderates all content that goes up on their site. And some statistics have shown that YouTube has nearly 400 hours of content being uploaded per minute. That is a staggering amount of information to keep a close watch on.

Now, YouTube has announced that they will be spending USD20 million (~RM83.6 million) to invest in an educational endeavour. This initiative will be going into a program called Learning Fund, which will aim to upload more educational content on YouTube. Current content creators such as Hank and John Green who upload a series called “Crash Course”, have received additional funding for their projects, and other independent channels will receive certain amounts as well.

This initiative was originally pitched by YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who also pioneered the creation of the channel “YouTube Learning” that was aimed at offering support to content creators who focused on education and learning. Wojcicki refers to these content creators as EduTubers and explains that any creators interested in applying for the Learning Fund, can do so via the blog post.

In addition to the fund initiative, YouTube has also held conferences called EduCon in California, Mexico and Brazil to connect these newly minted EduTubers to their new resources and to each other.

There have been concerns in the past that YouTube could be a source of misinformation. With this initiative, the company is taking a step in the right direction to curb it. As regular content consumers, this would give us some confidence that the content we are watching is credible and reliable.