My name is Raphael Jackson. I am a librarian and a student in my final semester of Law School. My wife Shantel is a former school teacher, private pilot and the CEO of a non-profit dedicated to improving educational access. All six of our children have been homeschooled since birth and our eldest child, 15, is now earning his B.A. in game design online at Baker College.
We recently had to forgo extracurricular activities such as piano/art/ballet/karate lessons and suspend in person meetings with the coding club we held in our home but like most home-schoolers, our families home education program was least affected by the school closures in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Online resources are an integral part of our curriculum. We invest in many paid subscription services and many of the online learning curriculum have linkable tutorial videos on YouTube. Besides the paid services we also use free tutorials found on the YouTube platform. To give back to the learning community our family maintains a YouTube channel called, the Jackson Academy Channel to which we upload art, coding, game design tutorials, and animations. Starting this month, we will also include Homeschooling tips for the millions of families now homeschooling in the wake of this pandemic and the school closures it has forced.
To mitigate time lost on advertisements I have utilized Ad blocking extensions while using YouTube. Recently my son was attempting to access a previously available piano tutorial as part of his piano courses. The tutorial was less part of a bite-sized review session and the video was less than 5 minutes long. I was upset when I learned that YouTube required my son to watch 9 minutes of ads before he could access the 5-minute-long tutorial. This is not only an educational barrier to us as homeschoolers but in the wake of school closures due to COVID-19, this is an educational barrier to all 55 million students forced to continue their education at home and would like to utilize YouTube tutorials to supplement their curriculum.
We applaud companies like JSTOR, BrainPOP, Great Courses Plus, Audible, and other educational services choosing to forgo temporary profits for becoming learning partners for families during this pandemic. Google has also donated hundreds of thousands to assist in online conferencing. This is why baffling that YouTube has taken a pro-advertisement and anti-user stance that disproportionally affects children. As YouTube loses users to newer platforms like TikTok and Vlare I hope that YouTube will consider their pro-advertisement stance lest they are remembered as the company that took advantage of families during this pandemic by bombarding children with predatory ads to increase its bottom line.
