Studying is something all college students have to do, but it’s not something we normally look forward to. There is an endless amount of YouTube channels that specialize in education that also make the material entertaining — whether it be through humor, color visuals or other mediums.
These Youtube channels may not be able to replace your textbooks or lectures, but they should at least be entertaining enough to help understand the material.
1. Overly Sarcastic Productions
Run by two friends who were college students when they started the channel. Overly Sarcastic Productions specializes in English and history. The two friends, known to their audience as Red and Blue, each cover one of these subjects.
Blue specializes in history, covering eras from the ancient Roman Empire all the way to the founding of the British Empire. Occasionally, he also does short biographies on certain historical figures, such as Machiavelli.
Red specializes in Literature, summarizing classics and myths like the works of Shakespeare, Journey to the West and the Iliad among many others. Additionally, she discusses tropes in fiction and gives advice to writers.
As their channel name implies, their videos broadly cover these topics with their own brand of sarcastic humor and enthusiasm. Also, the videos themselves are usually hand-drawn animations representing the subject matter.
2. Kurzgesagt
German for “in a nutshell,” Kurzgesagt specializes mainly in scientific tropes and sometimes philosophical topics. These videos can stretch from simple biology lessons to topics like the slim possibility of the universe ending at any moment. Some topics may fill you with existential dread, but in a fun way.
The videos are presented in a colorful animated format, with some notable characters being adorable birds. This welcoming format, along with the brilliant writing and narration, turns what some would consider boring topics like physics or philosophical lectures into viewpoints that grab your attention.
3. CrashCourse
This list would not be complete without CrashCourse.
Originally started by longtime YouTubers and brothers, Hank and John Green, CrashCourse is one of the largest educational YouTube channels with over 12 million subscribers.
They cover a broad range of topics, such as all of the aforementioned ones along with geography, linguistics, statistics and even engineering to name a few. It is in all likelihood that you can find an aid for whatever class you’re taking on their channel.
This channel does a wonderful job of making content very easy to digest for viewers, almost like a PBS show. Because of that, it's one of the very best.
4. Wisecrack
While on the surface this channel appears to just be a pop-culture-orientated space and not an educational one, appearances can be deceiving.
The channel simply uses pop culture as the setting for discussions of many topics such as philosophy and the social sciences. Sometimes, it simply discusses what goes into making a film or TV show — from the writing, drama, cinematography, character development, etc. Therefore making it a good resource for any student filmmaker.
With a massive video library, this channel is certain to have at least one topic that might interest you.
As the name implies, this channel is mainly about geography. However, it has a very unique format.
Each video is about one specific country and goes into a deep dive about not just that country’s geography, but also its history, languages, culture, traditions, ethnic groups and basically any information about that country.
Going through each video, it’s certain you’ll probably learn at least one new thing about a country that you thought you knew everything about.
However, it is important to know the channel is going through every country in alphabetical order. At the time of writing, its most recent video was on Sweden, so any countries that are alphabetically after that have not been covered yet, but will be coming soon.