Earlier last week, Google hosted its second edition of EduCon in New Delhi. The one-day summit brought together 200 creators who make videos explaining subjects, course contents as well as help Indians learn English and prepare for competitive exams.

The growth for ‘study material’ on YouTube has been largely organic. However, Google finally placed an attention on the same and has begun to encourage it, and shape it in the right direction. At the one-day event, YouTube announced that eight Indian creators were being awarded with the YouTube Learning Fund to develop high-quality educational content for YouTube.

YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki announced a USD 20 million fund for YouTube Learning last year as a part of which the video-sharing platform would support creators who create multi-sessional educational content for the company.

The content creators who have been awarded with the YouTube learning fund are: ExamFear Education Hindi, Learn Engineering, Don't Memorise, Study IQ Education, D'art of Science, Learnex - English Lessons Through Hindi, GetSetFlySCIENCE, and Let's Make Engineering Simple. Many of these channels already have millions of followers.

Don Anderson, Head of Family and Learning, YouTube APAC, who was in India on the sidelines of EduCon New Delhi 2019 said that a combination of content, community and platform is how YouTube was focussing on bringing high-quality educational content to its viewers. "We had EduCon as a big pillar for creators to get together and connect so that is to build the community. The next is the content, which of course supports the creators too. So last year we announced the Learning Fund and number of Indian creators were recipients of it. The Learning Fund was really a call for proposals to look at how to produce or how we could fund the production of high-quality multi-session content," he added.

Indian creators have a significant share in recently add-on feature of Youtube- learning playlist. "India has contributed 98 lessons in learning playlist and Indian creators contributed 10 of those learning playlists. And those 10 playlists came from four of the creators that we funded," said Anderson.

To avoid fake information, YouTube is focusing exclusively on high-quality educational content. "We have quality control. We have content guidelines and policiesThere are several different areas that we look at. The policy that we spell out and the announcements around that for one and very detailed guidelines. We rely on algorithms obviously. Those are trained by humans to ensure that that quality is maintained. Big part of this is workshops. Engagement like EduCon and I say the last bit is the community itself. I mean the community are your fact-checkers," said Anderson. "They (creators) have to appeal to the audience. The audience will come back and let you know if you are right or wrong. So there are a lot of checks and balances in play."