Online - education on YouTube before and after COVID 19. An example study on “Fun Science Romania”

The article aims to analyze how the public interest of an educational franchise has evolved and how it has been influenced by the pandemic. It compares the evolution of the traffic on the franchise’s YouTube channel, Profesorii Trasniti (Nutty Scientists), from two periods of time, “pre” and “post” pandemic, March 2020 being the calendar date taken as a benchmark.

The research methodology includes both a secondary analysis (based on articles published in the literature on topics such as: digitization, education in the virtual environment, social media as a tool in the equation) and a statistical measure of the difference between the proportions of the number of comments on published videos on the YouTube channel “Profesorii Trasniti” (Nutty Scientists) of the Fun Science Romania franchise, “pre” and “post” pandemic based on the data provided by the YouTube Analytics platform.

The questions that arise from this study are:

To what extent has the social media engagement of the “post” pandemic audience on the YouTube channel Profesorii Trasniti (Nutty Scientists) of the Fun Science Romania franchise increased in terms of its educational content?

To what extent has the interest in a strong educational content increased on YouTube compared to the one focused more on entertainment in the pandemic context caused by COVID 19?