Michael V. Miller and Anna S. CohenMiller
As instructional materials increasingly circulate through internet-based platforms rather than formal publication channels, instructors face persistent challenges sustaining informed engagement with teaching-relevant content over time. These challenges are often blamed on individual skill gaps or “rapid technological change.” Still, we argue they reflect a structural failure to support cumulative instructional practice under conditions of digital abundance. We introduce a framework distinguishing three interrelated stages of instructional media engagement: discovery, ongoing monitoring, and long-term pedagogical organization (D–M–O). Because platform-centered search and recommendation systems are designed for episodic retrieval, they routinely collapse these stages, limiting instructors’ capacity to reuse and refine instructional resources across courses and semesters. Using online video repositories as an illustrative case, we show how low-cost, faculty-managed monitoring and organizational infrastructures can support current awareness, durable pedagogical memory, and instructional continuity without prescribing specific tools or platforms.
This article is conceptual and methodological in nature and does not report original research on human subjects. No new datasets were generated or analyzed for this study. AI-assisted tools were used to improve clarity and flow during editing. The authors are solely responsible for the content of the article and its accuracy.
Research on personal information management (PIM) examines how people acquire, maintain, retrieve, and use information over time (Jones). Across professional contexts, PIM research shows that people struggle most when information is distributed across platforms, devices, and formats—and when the time horizon is long (Boardman & Sasse; Whittaker).
Instructional work is exactly this kind of case: instructors face expanding digital content with long time horizons (across multiple courses and semesters). Prior work in library and information science and learning environments has long discussed tools like RSS and social bookmarking, but often as “useful tools” rather than as infrastructures designed for distinct stages of engagement (e.g., Mu; Tenopir; PLE/PLN literature). Our contribution is to clarify the infrastructural logic: different tasks require different supports.
Instructional media curation has often focused on selecting individual artifacts—one documentary clip for one class session. That remains valuable, but it does not scale under contemporary conditions of continuous production and persistent access.
We therefore shift attention to online video repositories (OVRs): publicly accessible collections of videos that persist and grow over time (often hosted on platforms such as YouTube). OVRs are not static libraries; they are dynamic accumulating archives, streaming new material without typically displacing older content.
A scope note matters here: platform-provided AI features (summaries, chat interfaces,
recommendations) are best understood as interface overlays. They may change how viewers encounter content, but they do not eliminate the underlying need to manage accumulation over time.
Repository-level thinking changes the question from “What does this video say?” to:
“What kind of pedagogical objects does this repository distribute over time, and what kinds of labor and infrastructure are required to use it well?”
To address these challenges, we distinguish three analytically distinct but interrelated stages of instructional media engagement:
These stages differ temporally. Discovery is irregular; monitoring and organization are cumulative. However, platform-centered search and recommendation systems—designed for episodic retrieval—tend to collapse all three into “search,” obscuring their distinct infrastructural requirements.
The pedagogical value of D–M–O is realized downstream through retrieval and application:
Retrieval: locating relevant materials under the constraints of teaching practice (time pressure, cognitive load, alignment with learning goals).
Instructors can have “good stuff saved” but still fail pedagogically if they cannot retrieve it quickly when planning, or if it cannot be applied cleanly to what students are learning.
Although this framework is conceptual, it is grounded in systematic documentation of a working curation infrastructure. The appendices function as practice-based materials: they show the selection criteria, monitoring routines, and organizational decisions that operationalize the framework over time.
The demands associated with discovery, monitoring, and organization do not scale uniformly across course types.
In discipline-centered courses, discovery can be relatively front-loaded. Once a stable set of canonical sources is identified, monitoring may focus on a manageable number of repositories and organization can leverage established disciplinary categories.
By contrast, substantive-topic courses (e.g., social stratification, race and ethnic relations) face different scaling dynamics. Relevant instructional media is produced across multiple disciplines and adjacent fields (economics, political science, public policy, journalism, documentary filmmaking). Discovery remains open-ended; monitoring must respond to rapidly evolving empirical conditions; and organization cannot rely on a single disciplinary canon to provide the organizing logic.
In such courses, materials can become “dated” not over decades but over semesters as new cases, narratives, policy changes, and public debates reshape what is pedagogically salient. Under these conditions, monitoring and organization are not optional conveniences; they are essential supports for sustained instructional coherence.
Our intervention begins after relevant OVRs have been identified. It provides infrastructural support for two recurring tasks:
Organizing selected items so they remain retrievable and reusable across courses and semesters
Monitoring and organization solve different problems and are most effective when linked:
RSS monitoring supports current awareness by subscribing to updates from known repositories and consolidating new items in one place. It externalizes the attentional labor of “checking.”
Social bookmarking supports long-term pedagogical memory by storing selected items with brief notes and tags that enable flexible retrieval (by course, topic, analytic frame, pedagogical purpose).
A crucial feature of this pairing is the separation of continuous awareness from selective curation: monitoring can occur continuously, while organization occurs periodically during curation sessions.
Instead of repeatedly reconstructing teaching resources through search, instructors can build teaching libraries that grow over time. Each curated item retains contextual information—why it mattered, how it might be used, what it connects to—supporting retrieval under real instructional constraints.
Because tools come and go, the framework is technology-agnostic: its durability lies in the underlying logic (automated monitoring + structured organization), not in dependence on a particular service.
Under conditions of persistent digital accumulation, curation is best understood as infrastructure. D–M–O practices support instructional continuity by stabilizing access to previously identified resources, lowering retrieval friction, and enabling the repeated application and reuse of instructional media over time.
AI developments may influence how instructors encounter and summarize materials, but they do not remove the underlying infrastructural need for stable sources, accumulated collections, and durable metadata. In practice, AI works best when discovery has already occurred and when monitoring and organization are sustained rather than episodic.
In sum, the D–M–O distinction clarifies how instructors can reclaim agency over instructional media: moving from episodic search toward cumulative practice and durable pedagogical memory.
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APPENDIX A: OVR Starter Collections
Purpose and Status of Appendix A
This appendix should be read as empirical documentation of the curation of applied instructional media rather than as a descriptive inventory. It records systematic decisions regarding the discovery, inclusion, exclusion, and long-term organization of online video repositories across disciplines. The materials presented here make visible forms of classificatory and infrastructural labor that are typically hidden in platform-centered accounts of instructional media use. As such, Appendix A functions as a methodological record of how the Discovery–Monitoring–Organization (D–M–O) framework was operationalized in practice over time.
This appendix provides curated starting points for instructors implementing the RSS and social bookmarking framework across selected social science disciplines. Each starter collection identifies teaching-relevant Online Video Repositories (OVRs) selected to represent diverse source types, institutional locations, and content approaches. The collections are intentionally substantial enough to illustrate disciplinary scope and infrastructural variation, while remaining limited enough to foreground representative repositories rather than exhaustive coverage.
Although the framework described in this article is applicable across diverse academic disciplines, the appendix focuses on two social sciences—sociology and economics. These fields were selected strategically to illustrate how repository-level accumulation of instructional media operates under contrasting disciplinary conditions. Sociology and economics differ markedly in their patterns of content production, funding, institutional support, and pedagogical orientation, making them well-suited to demonstrating variation in the forms, scale, and organization of online video repositories. Limiting the appendix to two disciplines allows for greater descriptive depth and analytic clarity, and should be understood as illustrative rather than exhaustive.
Selection Criteria
Sociology and Economics repositories were selected to reflect diversity in institutional location (universities, research centers, independent creators, and project-based initiatives), pedagogical function (student-facing explanation, disciplinary memory, public engagement, methods, and pedagogy-as-object), and scale. Each discipline-specific list is intentionally limited to 10 repositories to emphasize analytic breadth and comparative clarity rather than completeness.
Using the Collections
Each entry identifies an OVR by name and provides a brief descriptive annotation. Where applicable, a project website is listed first, followed by a primary video channel. The collections are designed to support repository-level discovery and monitoring9 rather than one-off video search, and are intended to be used in conjunction with the RSS monitoring and social bookmarking infrastructure documented in Appendix B.
Note on Crash Course Repositories
The Crash Course project spans multiple social science disciplines and functions as a widely adopted, course-centered instructional resource. Because Crash Course is organized around sequenced, self-contained courses rather than open-ended repositories that reward ongoing monitoring, it is not included in the discipline-specific starter collections below. Instructors may nonetheless consider relevant Crash Course series as general-purpose supplements for introductory instruction across fields.
Note on Disciplinary Organizations
All social science disciplines are supported by major professional associations at national and international levels. While such organizations often maintain substantial video archives documenting professional activity, public engagement, and field-level debate, they are not included in the discipline-specific starter collections below. Readers are encouraged to consult relevant disciplinary organizations directly as part of ongoing professional awareness and engagement with their fields.
Supplementary Journalistic Video Repositories
Instructors frequently draw on high-volume journalistic video repositories to illustrate contemporary social processes, institutions, and everyday organizational practices. While such repositories often provide descriptively rich and engaging material, they are typically organized around episodic production cycles, topical relevance, and algorithmic distribution rather than cumulative pedagogical design or disciplinary coherence. As a result, they are less well-suited to sustained repository-level monitoring or long-term instructional organization, even though individual videos may be highly effective in the classroom.
Accordingly, these repositories are not included in the discipline-specific starter collections presented below, which emphasize stable repositories that benefit from ongoing monitoring and systematic indexing. Instead, they are best understood as supplementary instructional resources, repositories that are selectively sampled and analytically interrogated rather than continuously monitored, often functioning most effectively as objects of analysis rather than authoritative explanation. Representative examples include Business Insider, Vox, Bloomberg Originals, and DW Documentary.
Supplementary Pedagogical Resource Banks
In addition to video-centered repositories, instructors often rely on curated, cross-media pedagogical resource banks that aggregate video alongside books, articles, guides, and websites. An illustrative example is The REAL Resource Bank, a project-based collection focused on race, ethnicity, and antiracism learning. Rather than functioning as OVRs per se, such resource banks organize video within broader pedagogical contexts shaped by collective teaching practice. In the present framework, they are best understood as supplementary pedagogical infrastructure: valuable for discovery and contextual framing, but analytically distinct from video-centered repositories designed to support sustained monitoring and cumulative instructional organization.
Sociology: Interpreting the SOC 10 Starter Collection
The sociology starter collection highlights online video repositories that reflect the field’s comparatively decentralized and heterogeneous patterns of instructional media production. In contrast to economics, sociology’s video ecosystem is largely instructor-driven, shaped by individual pedagogical initiative, uneven institutional support, and diverse orientations toward public engagement. Sociological OVRs tend to emerge from classrooms, research projects, activist commitments, or professional reflection rather than from centralized infrastructures designed for scale. As a result, these repositories exhibit wide variation in production style, pacing, and instructional intent, with contributions accumulating episodically rather than through regularized output. Taken together, the repositories listed below illustrate how instructional video in sociology accumulates through dispersed, labor-intensive practices, and why sustained monitoring and organization are necessary for instructors seeking continuity amid fragmentation and change.
The brief analytic descriptors that accompany each entry serve as a typological guide rather than an evaluative ranking. Together, they show how accumulation in instructional media can take multiple forms: modular explanation, disciplinary memory, interactional record, public commentary, or institutional archiving. Collectively, the SOC 10 demonstrates that repository-level engagement enables instructors to draw on video not only as content but also as infrastructure for sustaining sociological thinking, teaching, and professional practice over time.
Sociology Online Video Repositories
Alexander Avila
(Accessible Sociology, Narrative Explanation & Hybrid Reflexive Pedagogy)
Alexander Avila’s OVR is an instructor-facing archive organized around long-form videos that address inequality, identity, culture, and everyday social interaction. The repository combines sociological explanation with humor, personal narrative, and visual storytelling, deliberately lowering affective and cognitive barriers to engagement while maintaining analytic intent.
The labor performed here is hybrid and reflexive. Avila draws on personal experience (including positionality as a trans creator) and formal sociological training to render abstract concepts legible and memorable. Rather than presenting sociology as detached analysis, the repository integrates biography and theory, modeling how lived experience and disciplinary reasoning can coexist productively. Accumulation occurs through a growing set of modular explainers that can be recombined across courses rather than through a linear curriculum.
Monitoring is valuable because new videos extend the repository’s conceptual coverage and stylistic repertoire. Within the SOC 10, Avila’s work exemplifies sociology as accessible explanation, where pedagogy is scaled through humor and narrative without sacrificing disciplinary substance.
Andrew Rezitnyk
(Reflexive Pedagogy, AI Integration & Institutional Adaptation)
Andrew Rezitnyk’s video repository treats pedagogy itself as a sociological object, with a sustained focus on artificial intelligence, assessment design, and academic integrity. Rather than positioning AI as an external threat to instruction, the repository frames it as a structural condition that instructors must theorize, manage, and incorporate into learning environments.
The repository accumulates as a record of pedagogical adaptation under rapidly shifting technological conditions. Videos address AI integration levels, assessment redesign, and transparency in instructional expectations, offering instructors conceptual tools rather than prescriptive rules. The emphasis is on analytic clarity regarding institutional constraints and student incentives rather than on moral panic or prohibition.
Monitoring matters because new videos respond to evolving instructional technologies and institutional debates. Within the SOC 10, Rezitnyk’s repository represents sociology as reflexive practice, where video functions as a medium for theorizing contemporary teaching conditions rather than delivering disciplinary content alone.
Demographile
(Disciplinary Memory, Demographic Scholarship & Archival Knowledge Preservation)
Demographile is a long-running sociology and demography OVR curated by Professor Elwood Carlson, devoted to documenting disciplinary knowledge, intellectual history, and scholarly community. The repository includes interviews with researchers, interpretive discussions of classic demographic studies, and sustained attention to the lives and works of influential figures such as Charles Nam.
Accumulation here is archival rather than instructional. Videos preserve disciplinary memory, research trajectories, methodological debates, and institutional histories that are seldom visible in textbooks. Rather than presenting simplified summaries for classroom consumption, the repository foregrounds intellectual genealogy and scholarly labor over time.
Monitoring is essential because new content extends the repository’s role as a living record of demography as a subfield. Within the SOC 10, Demographile exemplifies sociology as disciplinary memory, in which video memorializes knowledge production and sustains continuity across generations of scholars.
Havens Wright Center for Social Justice
(Institutional Public Sociology, Movement Scholarship & Programmatic Accumulation)
The Havens Wright Center for Social Justice is an OVR sponsored by the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Sociology, honoring the memory of A. Eugene Havens and Erik Olin Wright. The repository documents lectures, panels, workshops, and public events centered on social justice, inequality, labor, democracy, and emancipatory social change.
Unlike instructor-centered or creator-driven repositories, the Havens Wright Center’s archive reflects institutionalized public sociology. Accumulation occurs through sustained programming rather than episodic production: conferences, speaker series, and collaborative initiatives generate a growing archive of sociological debate and movement-oriented scholarship. Videos frequently foreground dialogue among scholars, activists, and organizers, positioning sociology as a collective intellectual practice embedded in broader political projects.
Monitoring is valuable because new content reflects evolving research agendas and contemporary struggles rather than curricular sequencing. Organization is essential because individual videos are typically deployed selectively—as contextual anchors, debate provocations, or exemplars of engaged sociology—rather than as self-contained instructional units.
Within the SOC 10, the Havens Wright Center represents sociology as institutional movement infrastructure, where video functions to preserve, circulate, and extend critical sociological knowledge beyond the classroom.
The Mad Sociologist
(Pedagogical Resistance, Civic Engagement & Educational Conflict Documentation)
The Mad Sociologist is an OVR created by Michael Andoscia, a long-time high school sociology teacher whose work bridges classroom instruction, civic engagement, and public resistance to educational repression. The repository includes recorded lessons, sociological explainers, and direct interventions addressing contemporary political developments, censorship, and state-level control over curriculum.
The repository documents pedagogical labor under conditions of institutional constraint, culminating in Andoscia’s public resignation following the removal of hundreds of books from his classroom. Accumulation here is inseparable from conflict: new videos respond to evolving political and educational pressures rather than advancing a stable instructional sequence. Video becomes both archive and testimony.
Monitoring matters because the repository functions as a living record of pedagogical struggle and educational contestation. Within the SOC 10, The Mad Sociologist represents sociology as pedagogical resistance, where video archives not only sociological knowledge but also the conditions under which that knowledge is contested.
Pop Culture Detective
(Media Critique, Gender Analysis & Cultural Power Examination)
Pop Culture Detective is an OVR created by Jonathan McIntosh, devoted to critical analysis of media, gender, power, and representation. Although not explicitly branded as a sociology project, the repository’s sustained engagement with sociological themes and its systematic analytical approach make it widely applicable to sociology teaching.
Videos are carefully scripted, narratively structured, and analytically dense, designed to stand alone as instructional objects. Accumulation occurs through thematic expansion rather than curricular sequencing, with new releases extending an ongoing critique of cultural narratives and power relations. Media texts are treated as sociological data and analyzed for embedded assumptions regarding masculinity, race, sexuality, and authority.
Monitoring is important because each new video contributes to a growing archive of sociologically informed media analysis. Within the SOC 10, Pop Culture Detective represents sociology through cultural critique, in which media analysis serves as a vehicle for sociological explanation and theoretical application.
Prof. David Stuckler
https://youtube.com/@profdavidstuckler?si=R01s072OwY4_kM80(Professional Sociology, Publishing Strategy & Academic Skill Formation)
The Prof. David Stuckler OVR is a sociology-adjacent instructional archive focused not on substantive empirical findings but on the craft of academic production. Stuckler provides extensive guidance on publishing strategies, manuscript positioning, journal selection, navigating reviewers, and the rhetorical construction of sociological arguments.
This repository is distinctive in that its pedagogical object is professional performance itself. Videos demystify processes that are typically learned informally or tacitly, translating accumulated academic experience into explicit, reusable instruction. Accumulation occurs through iterative refinement of advice in response to changes in publishing norms, evaluation regimes, and career structures.
Although Stuckler offers paid consulting related to publishing, his public-facing YouTube channel is encyclopedic in scope and exceptionally transparent. Monitoring is useful because new videos often address emerging pressures in academic labor markets and publication ecosystems. Organization is important because instructors and graduate students typically revisit specific videos at different stages of professional development.
Within the SOC 10, this repository presents sociology as a reflexive professional practice in which video supports the transmission of disciplinary know-how rather than disciplinary content.
Snakegrrl Sociology
(Integrated Scholarship, Subcultural Research & Public Media Practice)
Snakegrrl Sociology is an OVR created by Professor Beverly Yuen Thompson, whose work integrates research, teaching, and public engagement through sustained video production. The repository draws heavily on Thompson’s long-standing research on subcultures—most notably tattoo communities and digital nomads—as well as on her broader commitment to visual sociology, public scholarship, and reflexive engagement with academic labor.
Video is largely treated not as an ancillary teaching aid but as a core methodological and professional practice. The repository includes research-driven content, pedagogical reflections, and meta-commentary on the risks and rewards of doing sociology in public-facing media spaces. Accumulation occurs across multiple domains of sociological life, blurring boundaries between scholarship, pedagogy, identity, and outreach.
Monitoring matters because new videos extend both substantive research themes and ongoing reflection on sociological media work itself. Within the SOC 10, Snakegrrl Sociology presents sociology as an integrated media practice in which repositories function simultaneously as sites of research dissemination, pedagogical experimentation, and professional self-formation.
SOC 119
https://youtube.com/@soc119?si=i2rGDzv1NZ8yvUE6(Dialogic Pedagogy, Classroom Sociology & Interactive Knowledge Production)
SOC 119 is an OVR composed of recorded sessions from a long-running undergraduate course on race relations taught at Penn State University by Sam Richards. Unlike repositories built around polished lectures or modular explainers, SOC 119 foregrounds the classroom itself as a site of sociological production. Videos document extended student participation, spontaneous dialogue, emotional disclosure, and collective sense-making, treating interaction not as a pedagogical supplement but as the core instructional medium.
The repository accumulates through pedagogical risk rather than curricular design. Content is unscripted and often unpredictable, capturing moments of conflict, uncertainty, and reflexivity that are typically absent from formal instructional media. Rather than refining explanation, the archive preserves interaction.
Monitoring matters because new recordings extend a living archive of classroom sociology, offering instructors insight into how sociological concepts are negotiated, resisted, and internalized in real time. Within the SOC 10, SOC 119 presents sociology as dialogic pedagogy, in which accumulation takes the form of documented interaction and video serves as a record of teaching practice itself.
SociologistRay
(Foundational Sociology, Conceptual Clarity & Instructor-Facing Modularity)
SociologistRay is a video repository created by Professor Rashawn Ray, focused on concise explanations of core sociological concepts, theories, and contemporary issues. Videos are short, modular, and designed for reuse across introductory sociology and race relations courses, prioritizing conceptual clarity and instructional consistency over stylistic experimentation.
Accumulation occurs through steady expansion of foundational coverage rather than through topical responsiveness or media commentary. New videos typically clarify key concepts, refine explanations, or address recurring areas of student confusion. The repository is intentionally instructor-facing, offering ready-to-deploy explanations that complement textbooks and lectures.
Monitoring is useful for identifying newly added concepts or refined explanations that can be integrated with minimal adaptation. Within the SOC 10, SociologistRay represents sociology as foundational instruction, where repositories function as stable, instructor-facing supplements to formal curriculum.
Economics: Starter Collection of Online Video Repositories
The economics starter collection highlights online video repositories that reflect the field’s distinctive patterns of instructional media production and dissemination. In contrast to sociology, economics has developed a comparatively centralized and well-resourced video ecosystem, shaped by professionalized production, sustained institutional backing, and efforts to standardize conceptual delivery at scale. Many economic OVRs are organized around core principles and policy debates, often embedded within think tanks, research centers, or philanthropic infrastructures. As a result, economic video repositories tend to exhibit higher production values and more regular output, with clearer pedagogical scaffolding than is typical in sociology. Taken together, the repositories listed below illustrate how instructional video in economics accumulates through infrastructure-intensive practices, and why repository-level monitoring and organization are essential for instructors navigating a dense and continuously expanding media environment.
Economics Online Video Repositories
Adam’s Axiom is an instructor-facing economics OVR organized around the systematic explanation of core economic concepts. Rather than operating as a news-responsive channel or policy commentary outlet, the repository is structured as a growing conceptual archive, with individual videos designed to be modular, reusable, and easily integrated into introductory and intermediate economics courses. The emphasis is on clarity, internal coherence, and pedagogical pacing rather than topical immediacy.
The labor performed in Adam’s Axiom is didactic and cumulative. Videos are produced to refine explanation rather than to intervene in controversy, resulting in a repository that accumulates slowly but deliberately. New additions tend to extend conceptual coverage, clarify difficult ideas, or improve prior explanations, making monitoring valuable for tracking the maturation of an instructional corpus rather than reacting to external events.
Within the ECO 10, Adam’s Axiom represents a form of economics OVR work oriented toward instructional completeness rather than persuasion, exemplifying how repository-level accumulation can function as a long-term pedagogical asset built through sustained explanatory labor.
Democracy at Work
https://www.democracyatwork.info
https://www.youtube.com/user/democracyatwrk
(Political Economy, Labor-Centered Analysis & Public Pedagogy)Democracy at
Democracy at Work is an OVR associated with Richard D. Wolff and collaborators, which addresses political economy, labor, and alternative economic arrangements from a Marxist perspective. The repository foregrounds questions of power, class, and workplace democracy, situating economic analysis within broader struggles over ownership, governance, and inequality. Content includes lectures, interviews, short explainers, and responses to contemporary economic developments. The repository accumulates dialogically, with new videos responding to unfolding political, economic, and labor-related events rather than advancing a fixed curriculum.
Monitoring is therefore essential: releases are episodic and often keyed to current debates, policy changes, or crises, making the repository particularly valuable for instructors seeking to connect economic theory to lived social conflict.
As an ECO 10 OVR, Democracy at Work exemplifies economics as public pedagogy, in which accumulation reflects ongoing engagement with social movements and political struggle rather than a standardized instructional sequence.
Economic Policy Institute
(Institutional Economics, Empirical Authority & Policy Translation)
The Economic Policy Institute maintains a video repository embedded within a broader institutional mission to produce and disseminate research on labor markets, wages, inequality, and economic policy. Videos typically translate empirical findings into accessible formats, contextualizing data within policy debates and institutional analysis. Unlike creator-driven repositories, EPI’s video output is shaped by organizational priorities, research cycles, and advocacy goals.
Accumulation here is institutional rather than personal. Videos emerge as extensions of reports, policy interventions, and public commentary, making monitoring valuable as a way of tracking shifts in economic discourse and empirical emphasis over time. Authority is derived from research credibility and organizational continuity rather than personality or stylistic branding.
Within the ECO 10, EPI represents a form of economics OVR work grounded in policy translation and empirical legitimacy, illustrating how institutional repositories accumulate pedagogical value through sustained engagement with matters of real-world economic governance.
Economics Media Library
https://econ.video
(Curated Media, Edited Content & Pedagogical Indexing)
Economics Media Library is a curated repository of economics videos developed by Professor Jadrian Wooten, building on and extending the tradition of edited-content projects such as the “Economics of …” series. The repository aggregates clips from films, television, news, and other media, organizing them around economic concepts and instructional themes.
The labor here is curatorial and organizational. Value is generated not through original production but through systematic selection, indexing, and contextualization. Accumulation occurs as new media examples are added and categorized, making monitoring important for identifying newly indexed content relevant to specific courses or concepts.
Within the ECO 10, Economics Media Library exemplifies economics as pedagogical curation, where instructional power derives from organization and reuse rather than authorship.
(Working-Class Economics, Experiential Authority & Everyday Political Economy)
Professor Gary Stephenson's OVR is grounded in lived experience and working-class perspectives on economic insecurity, labor, and inequality. Rather than presenting economics as an abstract system of models or policies, the repository frames economic processes through everyday struggles over employment, wages, debt, and survival. The tone is direct and experiential, often privileging narrative over formal exposition.
The repository accumulates organically, with new videos responding to shifts in economic conditions, personal experience, and broader social developments. Monitoring matters because content reflects changing material realities rather than a stable conceptual sequence. Authority here is experiential rather than institutional, offering a counterpoint to professionally produced or donor-funded economics OVRs.
Within the ECO 10, Gary’s Economics represents economics from below, demonstrating how video repositories can function as sites where economic knowledge is produced through lived conditions rather than academic abstraction.
Learn Liberty is a professionally produced economics video repository developed at George Mason University's Institute for Humane Studies. The repository combines high production values, animated explainers, and pop-culture references to advance market-oriented economic perspectives. Videos are tightly scripted, visually polished, and explicitly designed for wide dissemination and reuse.
Accumulation in Learn Liberty is strategic and infrastructure-intensive. New videos are produced in response to emerging policy debates, cultural moments, and ideological opportunities, extending a coherent economic worldview rather than completing a bounded instructional curriculum. Monitoring is essential because releases are coordinated and episodic, often aligned with broader advocacy initiatives.
Within the ECO 10, Learn Liberty exemplifies economics as a scaled ideological instruction, in which professional media production and philanthropic funding enable sustained, high-volume content creation aimed at shaping public understanding of economic life.
Money & Macro is an actively publishing economics video repository created by economist Joeri Schasfoort, focused on macroeconomic theory, global economic dynamics, and public economic narratives. Videos frequently connect abstract macroeconomic concepts to concrete international developments, policy choices, and structural trends, making the repository especially relevant for courses addressing globalization and economic change.
The repository is accumulated through narrative reframing rather than through curricular sequencing. New videos reinterpret familiar economic ideas in light of changing conditions, dominant media narratives, or emerging data. Monitoring is therefore valuable for tracking how macroeconomic explanations evolve alongside global economic transformations.
Within the ECO 10, Money & Macro represents macro-level sensemaking, where economics is presented as an interpretive framework for understanding complex, interconnected systems.
New Economic Thinking
(Heterodox Economics, Disciplinary Critique & Intellectual Pluralism)
New Economic Thinking is associated with efforts to challenge and expand mainstream economic frameworks. Content includes interviews, lectures, and panel discussions featuring economists and scholars engaged in heterodox approaches, institutional critique, and methodological reflection. The repository foregrounds debate, disagreement, and alternative perspectives rather than settled consensus.
Accumulation is dialogic and archival. New videos extend ongoing conversations about the limits of orthodox economics and the need for conceptual renewal. Monitoring matters because the repository reflects shifts in disciplinary critique and intellectual alignment over time rather than a linear pedagogical progression.
Within the ECO 10, New Economic Thinking represents economics as contested knowledge, where video functions as a medium for disciplinary self-examination and reform.
Radical Discourse
(Creative Pop-Economics, Media Expertise & Scaled Ideological Persuasion)
Radical Discourse is an economics-oriented video repository and media brand associated with John Papola and the broader Emergent Order ecosystem. The project extends the creative approach pioneered in EconStories by staging economic debates as performative, high-production cultural events rather than as conventional instructional media.
Substantively, Radical Discourse dramatizes economic disagreement rather than resolving it. Competing positions are embodied in characters, lyrics, and storylines, rendering economic theory a spectator experience.
The labor performed here is aestheticized ideological pedagogy. Over time, the repository accumulates as a media archive of economic controversy, where new productions extend a recognizable style rather than a cumulative curriculum.
Within the ECO 10, Radical Discourse represents economics as popular culture, in which disciplinary ideas are disseminated through professional media production rather than through classrooms, policy briefs, or academic debate.
Unlearning Economics is a video repository dedicated to critiquing mainstream economic narratives, methods, and teaching practices. Videos often respond directly to popular explanations of economic phenomena, exposing assumptions, omissions, and ideological commitments embedded in conventional discourse. The tone is analytical and corrective, aimed at reshaping how audiences understand economics.
Accumulation is reactive and argumentative. New videos are produced in response to prevailing economic claims circulating in media and education, making monitoring essential for tracking the evolving targets of critique.
Within the ECO 10, Unlearning Economics represents economics as critical pedagogy, where video functions as a tool for disruption, correction, and conceptual unlearning.
Comparing Sociological and Economic Video Ecologies
Read together, the SOC 10 and ECO 10 starter collections reveal systematic disciplinary differences in how instructional video accumulates, circulates, and becomes pedagogically usable. Sociology’s video ecology is comparatively decentralized, creator-driven, and heterogeneous, with repositories emerging from individual instructors, classrooms, subfields, and public intellectual projects. Accumulation in sociology frequently takes the form of dialogic interaction, disciplinary memory, pedagogical reflection, or integrated scholarly identity, often requiring selective reuse, clipping, and contextual framing by instructors.
Economics, by contrast, exhibits a more centralized and infrastructure-intensive video ecosystem. Many economic repositories are embedded within think tanks, research institutes, advocacy organizations, or professionally managed media projects, supported by philanthropic or institutional resources. Accumulation tends to occur through standardized explainers, policy translation, ideological persuasion, or curated media archives, with higher production values and more regular release cycles. As a result, economics instructors face a denser and more rapidly expanding media environment, where pedagogical value often derives from strategic monitoring and selective deployment rather than from sequential curriculum adoption.
These contrasts underscore the analytic value of repository-level engagement. While both disciplines confront problems of instructional media abundance, the forms of accumulation they encounter—and the kinds of pedagogical labor required to manage them—differ in predictable, discipline-specific ways. RSS monitoring and social bookmarking infrastructures provide a common solution precisely because they accommodate this variation, supporting heterogeneous accumulation patterns without imposing uniform instructional models.
APPENDIX B: RSS Monitoring and Social Bookmarking Infrastructure
This appendix documents the RSS monitoring and social bookmarking infrastructure used to support repository-level engagement with instructional video. The infrastructure is designed to operationalize the distinction between ongoing awareness and long-term pedagogical organization introduced in the main text. Rather than treating discovery, monitoring, and organization as a single activity collapsed into search, the system separates these functions across complementary tools, enabling instructors to manage persistent growth in instructional media without requiring continuous evaluative labor.
Discipline-Specific RSS Monitoring Pages
For each discipline included in Appendix A, a dedicated RSS page aggregates feeds from the selected online video repositories (available at https://www.protopage.com/2026millercohenmiller#OVRs_Sociology and https://www.protopage.com/2026millercohenmiller#OVRs_Economics). These pages function as monitoring interfaces, allowing instructors to observe new content as it is released without requiring repeated manual searching. Each repository contributes a single primary feed, ensuring that monitoring occurs at the repository level rather than through keyword searches or topic-specific alerts.
RSS pages are intentionally limited to repositories that merit sustained attention over time; repositories that do not reward ongoing monitoring are excluded from this layer. In this way, RSS supports continuous awareness of instructional media accumulation while minimizing noise and redundant effort.
Notifications and Attention Management
In addition to passive aggregation through RSS pages, the monitoring layer may incorporate optional notification mechanisms that alert instructors to new content as it appears. Notifications function as a selective extension of monitoring, allowing instructors to externalize attentional labor by delegating awareness of change to the system rather than relying on habitual checking. Importantly, notifications are not intended to prompt immediate evaluation or adoption of new materials, but to signal that new content exists and may warrant later review. When configured, notifications support peripheral awareness of instructional media accumulation while preserving instructor control over when content examination is undertaken.
Social Bookmarking and Pedagogical Memory
Social bookmarking entries serve a distinct and complementary function. Whereas RSS pages surface what is new, social bookmarking records judgment and retention. For each repository included in the starter collections, a repository-level bookmark captures the rationale for monitoring that source, documenting its pedagogical orientation, scope, and relevance. In addition, a video from each OVR is bookmarked to illustrate how repositories can be used for instructional purposes. These bookmarks function as an externalized pedagogical memory, allowing instructors to retrieve previously evaluated materials across courses and semesters without re-assessing them from scratch (available at https://pinboard.in/u:2026millercohenmiller/).
Organizational Tagging and Pedagogical Retrieval
The social bookmarking component of the monitoring and organization infrastructure relies on a deliberately designed tagging system to support retrieval and pedagogical application amid persistent content accumulation. Rather than attempting to represent all topical or disciplinary features of instructional media, tagging functions here as an infrastructural mechanism for encoding pedagogical judgment in a form that can be reliably retrieved across courses and semesters.
Tagging follows a hybrid logic that combines a small number of structured metadata fields with lightweight pedagogical and evaluative descriptors. Structured tags are used for dimensions that instructors are likely to filter on during course preparation, such as content type and analytic frame, while unstructured tags are reserved for coarse evaluative judgments and affective qualities that support recognition-based recall. This design reflects the practical constraints of instructional preparation, where retrieval must occur quickly, often under time pressure.
At minimum, each bookmarked item includes a structured tag indicating its object type (e.g., repository-level source or individual video) and one or two analytic frame tags corresponding to core conceptual lenses used across courses. These frame tags function as a shared, cross-disciplinary vocabulary that allows materials to be retrieved consistently regardless of disciplinary origin. Additional structured tags may indicate pedagogical use (e.g., discussion catalyst, illustration, provocation), allowing anticipated applications to be encoded at the point of organization rather than improvised at the moment of use.
Alongside these structured tags, items may be labeled with a small number of deliberately coarse evaluative tags (e.g., good, excellent, tested). These tags do not represent formal assessment or quality ranking; instead, they serve as retrieval accelerators that distinguish materials judged to have instructional potential from those retained primarily for reference. Because instructional value is often confirmed only through classroom interaction, evaluative tagging is understood as provisional and subject to revision over time.
Finally, tags are used selectively to capture the emotional or experiential qualities of instructional media when these are pedagogically salient. Instructors frequently recall the affective impact of a resource—such as its ability to provoke surprise, discomfort, or engagement—before recalling its specific content. Encoding such qualities supports recognition-based retrieval and helps explain why certain materials become durable components of instructional repertoires.
Taken together, this tagging scheme operationalizes organization as a form of externalized pedagogical memory. By encoding analytic orientation, anticipated use, and evaluative judgment in lightweight metadata, the social bookmarking system supports retrieval under instructional constraints and facilitates the repeated application and reuse of instructional media over time. Importantly, the tagging system is intentionally minimal: its purpose is not exhaustive description, but reliable retrieval and pedagogical applicability across contexts.
Separation of Functions
Taken together, the RSS and social bookmarking components enable instructors to separate ongoing monitoring from cumulative organization. RSS supports continuous, low-cost surveillance of instructional media as it accumulates, while social bookmarking records durable decisions about what is worth retaining and reusing. This separation allows instructors to remain informed about new content without conflating awareness with adoption, and to build structured instructional archives incrementally over time. The infrastructure thus supports scalable engagement with online instructional video by distributing labor across distinct stages.
For readers interested in implementing the RSS monitoring and social bookmarking infrastructure described here, a separate step-by-step guide detailing setup and configuration is available from the authors upon request.
APPENDIX C: Platform AI Features and Analytic Scope
Recent developments in platform-provided artificial intelligence have introduced new interface-level features into video-hosting environments, including automated summaries, conversational prompts, and enhanced recommendation systems. These tools operate at the level of user interaction and access rather than at the level of content production, repository structure, or pedagogical authorship.
In this study, such AI-mediated features are treated as ephemeral interface overlays rather than as intrinsic components of online video repositories. While they may influence how instructors or students engage with instructional media at particular moments, they do not alter the underlying processes of repository accumulation, creator labor, monitoring requirements, or long-term pedagogical organization that constitute the analytic focus of the D–M–O framework.
Accordingly, the presence or absence of platform-provided AI features is not treated as a defining property of OVRs, nor as a determinant of their pedagogical function over time. Instead, these features are understood as potentially amplifying the value of existing curatorial infrastructures by operating on already-discovered, monitored, and organized instructional materials.