Free-choice teaching: how YouTube presents a new kind of teacher

This study presents a characterization of YouTube website (http://www.youtube.com) as a venue for informal science teaching and learning, as well as some advance in its definition. A significant portion of users spend time on YouTube watching potentially educational videos, why it happens and what leads people to produce them was investigated. Interviews with three producers of educational YouTube videos were conducted and from the analysis it was found that these videos producers have free-choice to decide what to teach, as opposed to a regular teacher, who has a curriculum to manage. This producer, named as a "teacher who teaches by free-choice" has less restriction on what to teach, which establishes a different relationship to knowledge and to the apprentices, mostly based on interest. It was possible to create an analogy to the teaching system presented by Chevallard (2005), illustrating the relationship between this "teacher who teaches by free-choice", the "informal learner" and the "knowledge". This system is a specific case of a general learning venue, which consists in a learner, some knowledge and a source of knowledge, along with their relationships. This idea must be put to the test by other investigations, in order to be shown valid