Managing Educational Media at Scale:
Infrastructure for Monitoring and Organizing Online Video
Michael V. Miller and Anna S. CohenMiller
Abstract
As instructional materials increasingly circulate through internet-based platforms rather than formal publication channels, faculty face persistent challenges in sustaining informed engagement with such content over time. These challenges are often attributed to individual skill gaps or rapid technological change, but we argue that they reflect a deeper structural failure to support cumulative instructional practice under conditions of digital abundance. We introduce a framework that distinguishes among three interrelated but analytically distinct stages of instructional media engagement: discovery, ongoing monitoring, and long-term pedagogical organization (D–M–O). We show how these stages are routinely collapsed into within platform-centered search models, obscuring their differing infrastructural requirements and limiting instructors’ capacity to reuse and refine instructional resources across courses and semesters. Conceptually, the D–M–O distinction clarifies how instructors can move from episodic search toward cumulative practice by stabilizing the conditions under which materials can be retrieved for course preparation and applied in instruction. Using online collections of video as an illustrative case, we demonstrate how low-cost, faculty-managed monitoring and organizational infrastructures can support sustained current awareness, durable pedagogical memory, and instructional continuity without prescribing specific tools or platforms. Although developed in relation to instructional video, the D–M–O framework is intended to generalize to a wide range of internet-based instructional materials, offering a conceptual basis for understanding how higher education can better support teaching practice under conditions of persistent digital accumulation.
Acknowledgments
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 support editing for clarity and flow. The authors are solely responsible for the content of the article and its accuracy.
1. Introduction: The Structural Roots of Information Management Failure
Since 2010, recurring surveys administered by the first author in sociology courses have asked students from a wide range of majors and backgrounds two basic questions about their online practices: when you encounter valuable web content, how do you ensure that you can find it again, and when you identify a website or video channel that reliably produces useful material, how do you stay aware of new content from that source?
Although most students report high confidence in their ability to work effectively online, their responses reveal a persistent gap between perceived competence and actual practice. When asked how they preserve materials for later use, students commonly describe ad hoc strategies such as re-searching by title, bookmarking browser tabs, saving links locally, taking screenshots, or emailing links to themselves. These practices are widely acknowledged as fragmented and unreliable for supporting reuse over time. When asked how they monitor sources for new content, most report not monitoring them at all, or relying on memory and occasional manual checks.
This pattern—high confidence paired with ineffective practice—has remained stable across cohorts. Its persistence suggests a structural problem rather than an individual or generational one. If students, despite lifelong immersion in digital environments, continue to lack systematic approaches to preserving and monitoring online materials, there is little reason to assume that faculty have acquired such practices spontaneously. Research on information practices supports this conclusion: instructors rely on similar ad hoc strategies, including informal bookmarking, memory-based retrieval, and episodic searching (Jacques et al., 2021).
These findings run counter to a familiar assumption in higher education: that students, as so-called “digital natives,” possess intuitive mastery of online environments, while faculty lag behind due to later-life adoption (Prensky, 2001). This framing has been widely critiqued (Bennett et al., 2008; Kirschner & De Bruyckere, 2017). Empirical research consistently shows that students rely on episodic keyword searching, algorithmically ranked results, and informal saving practices that closely mirror those of their instructors (Head & Eisenberg, 2010, 2011). The issue, therefore, is not technological lag, but the absence of taught workflows for monitoring content sources, capturing pedagogically relevant materials, and maintaining retrievable collections over time (Jones, 2007, 2012; ACRL, 2016).
The significance of this gap has intensified as online instructional media have shifted from relative scarcity to persistent accumulation. Advances in digital production and distribution have enabled instructional materials—particularly video—to be created and shared at unprecedented scale (Burgess & Green, 2009). Platforms such as YouTube now host vast and continuously expanding repositories of instructional content. Materials that were once scarce and institutionally bound have become largely free, durable, and persistently available.
This transformation does not simply mean that more instructional material exists. Rather, it reflects a condition of ongoing accumulation in which content is produced continuously, remains accessible over time, and expands across semesters rather than being replaced. Under these conditions, the instructional challenge is no longer locating relevant material once, but sustaining informed engagement with growing repositories of content.
In this context, the ability to monitor instructional sources and organize selected materials becomes more than a matter of individual efficiency. These practices shape the resources that instructors encounter, retain, and integrate into their teaching over time. In their absence, instructional media use remains episodic, memory-dependent, and vulnerable to disruption; when supported, instructors can reuse vetted materials, preserve pedagogical context, and maintain continuity as curricula, platforms, and institutional conditions change. Monitoring and organization thus function as basic instructional infrastructures rather than optional enhancements.
It is this shift—from episodic scarcity to persistent accumulation—that motivates distinguishing among discovery, monitoring, and long-term organization as analytically distinct problems. Discovery, in this sense, is not simply a matter of locating material once, but reflects broader conditions of visibility that shape which instructional sources become known, which remain salient, and which disappear from view over time. Although often treated as a single activity within platform-centered environments, these practices unfold across different temporal horizons and pose distinct infrastructural demands.
The problem with platform-centered search is not only that it treats instructional media as something to be found once and then forgotten. It also shapes what remains visible over time. Content that is institutionally supported, professionally branded, or rewarded by engagement metrics is repeatedly surfaced, while pedagogically valuable sources that do not align with platform signals fade from view. As a result, instructors are pulled back into repeated searching—not because monitoring and organization lack value, but because platforms provide little support for keeping important sources visible and retrievable across time.
This article advances an analytic framework for understanding why higher education has struggled to sustain effective engagement with instructional media under conditions of digital abundance. We argue that these difficulties stem not from individual skill deficits or resistance to technology, but from a structural failure to distinguish among three analytically distinct stages of instructional media engagement: discovery, ongoing monitoring, and long-term pedagogical organization.
We formalize this distinction as the Discovery–Monitoring–Organization (D–M–O) framework and show how each stage is routinely collapsed within platform-centered search and recommendation systems. Rather than proposing new tools or applications, our contribution lies in clarifying the infrastructural logic required to support cumulative teaching practice over time. Using instructional video repositories as a focal case, we illustrate how low-cost, faculty-managed monitoring and organizational infrastructures can enhance instructional durability, pedagogical continuity, and faculty agency across courses and semesters. Although developed for online video, the framework is intended to generalize to a wide range of internet-based instructional materials circulating in contemporary higher education.
2. Personal Information Management and Educational Content
Research on personal information management (PIM) examines how individuals acquire, maintain, retrieve, and use information in their daily work (Jones, 2007, 2008). Across professional contexts, PIM studies consistently document difficulties in maintaining information over time, particularly when materials are distributed across multiple platforms, devices, and formats (Boardman & Sasse, 2004; Whittaker, 2011). These findings are directly relevant to instructional contexts, where instructors must manage large and continuously expanding bodies of digital content under conditions of persistence and accumulation.
Evidence that instructors and students lack systematic preparation for managing ongoing flows of instructional media is documented across PIM and related work. Studies repeatedly show a reliance on ad hoc practices, such as episodic searching, informal bookmarking, and memory-based retrieval, rather than explicit strategies for monitoring content sources or maintaining retrievable collections over time (Jones, 2007, 2008; Jacques et al., 2021). These patterns recur across professional and educational settings, suggesting that deficits are systemic rather than individual or cohort-specific (Whittaker, 2011). Rather than extending personal information management concepts into a new domain, this article treats instructional media curation as a distinct infrastructural problem shaped by pedagogical time horizons, disciplinary norms, and institutional conditions.
The distinction between discovery, monitoring, and organization has been recognized unevenly in prior work on current-awareness tools. Research in library and information science has examined how emerging web technologies reshape academic practices of staying informed, typically emphasizing tools and systems that surface new information or support personal collections rather than sustained instructional reuse (Tenopir et al., 2013; Bawden & Robinson, 2009; Case & Given, 2016).
For example, from a librarian's perspective, Mu (2008) identified RSS feeds and social bookmarking systems as valuable resources for managing new online information streams, treating them as complementary rather than unified practices. Mu and Kern (2011) later described leading workshops introducing these tools to faculty, demonstrating feasibility and institutional interest while framing adoption through episodic training rather than as an embedded, cumulative workflow.
Research on Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) and Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) has also long emphasized learner control over distributed digital tools, frequently citing RSS aggregation and social bookmarking as illustrative components of self-directed learning environments (e.g., Attwell, 2007; Downes, 2005; Drexler, 2010; Dabbagh & Kitsantas, 2012). In this literature, RSS is typically framed as a mechanism for accessing information streams, while social bookmarking is treated as a means of organizing and sharing resources. These tools, however, are generally discussed descriptively—as elements within a learner’s toolkit—rather than analytically, as distinct infrastructural responses to different stages of instructional engagement with expanding content streams. As a result, issues of sustained monitoring, cumulative organization, and pedagogical reuse over time have remained underspecified.
We build on this tradition but explicitly link monitoring and organizing into a unified, cumulative practice oriented toward long-term instructional use. Rather than treating RSS and social bookmarking as independent solutions, our framework integrates them into a faculty-managed knowledge infrastructure. In this formulation, “current awareness” is reconceptualized not as an episodic activity focused on discovery, but as an ongoing process that supports continuous monitoring, durable organization, and planned reuse of instructional media across courses and semesters.
3. From Individual Media to Repository-Level Thinking
Historically, instructional film and media curation in higher education has focused on individual artifacts such as feature films, documentaries, or isolated video clips selected for specific instructional moments. This item-level approach remains pedagogically valuable, particularly when instructors curate materials that are tightly aligned with specific course topics or class sessions. However, it does not scale well under contemporary conditions in which instructional video content is produced continuously by creators and made persistently available across multiple online platforms (Burgess & Green 2009; Cunningham & Craig 2019).
Repository-level thinking shifts attention from individual media items to sources that reliably distribute instructional content over time.
This shift presupposes a form of discovery oriented toward identifying stable sources rather than isolated artifacts, emphasizing recognition of productive repositories over repeated item-level searching. At this level, we focus on online video repositories (OVRs): discrete, publicly accessible collections of videos that persist and grow over time, whether hosted on dedicated websites or within larger platforms. OVRs function less as static collections than as dynamic, accumulating archives (Lobato 2019). These repositories stream new materials without usually displacing older content, resulting in expanding media collections that persist across semesters and instructional contexts. [FOOTNOTE HERE: Platform-provided artificial intelligence features (e.g., automated summaries, conversational interfaces, or interface-level recommendations) are treated here as viewer-side overlays rather than intrinsic properties of online video repositories. Accordingly, such features are analytically distinct from the processes of content accumulation, monitoring, and pedagogical organization examined in this study.]
Much of the repository-level instructional content available across the social sciences is streamed on demand from YouTube, and our OVR research reflects this empirical reality. We treat YouTube not as a pedagogical model, but as the dominant infrastructural substrate in which educational video repositories are currently hosted. While many creators maintain a presence on other platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok, YouTube remains the primary platform for hosting comprehensive content libraries and for enabling systematic, long-term monitoring via stable RSS feeds. In combination with its global reach and monetization infrastructure, YouTube supports regular upload schedules and content continuity, conditions that enable ongoing monitoring and cumulative organization. Nevertheless, the framework proposed here is not platform-specific; it is designed to operate wherever instructional repositories exhibit similar properties of persistence and scale.
Recent research on faculty video use suggests that such repositories are now embedded in routine teaching practice rather than used episodically as supplemental resources. At the same time, instructors report persistent difficulties related to content discovery, filtering, and long-term organization, even when perceived pedagogical value is high (Greeves & Oz 2024). These findings reinforce the need to distinguish between short-term search-based engagement and the sustained infrastructural support required for working with continuously updating repositories.
Managing such repositories requires different forms of support than working with individual files. Rather than making one-time selections, instructors must sustain awareness of new content, evaluate materials as repositories evolve, and organize selected items for reuse over time (Whittaker 2011; Jones 2012). Consistent with broader research on educational technology adoption, these challenges appear less related to initial motivation than to the availability of facilitating conditions that support continued use (Teo 2011). Repository-level thinking thus reframes instructional media curation from a series of discrete selection decisions to an ongoing OVR management process.
Historically, institutionalized curation has emerged as a pragmatic response to problems of informational abundance. In anthropology, the postwar expansion of ethnographic research exceeded the capacity of individual scholars to systematically locate, compare, and reuse materials, prompting the creation of the Human Relations Area Files (founded in 1949) as shared infrastructure for indexing and retrieval. A parallel dynamic later emerged in sociology as instructionally relevant videos began to circulate online. When The Sociological Cinema launched in 2010, only five years after YouTube’s founding, educational video creation as a focused and widespread practice was still in its early stages. Relatively few creators—whether early YouTubers or instructors experimenting with uploaded lectures—were producing instructional content, and instructional media largely circulated as discrete, individually discoverable items rather than as continuously updating repositories. Consistent with these conditions, the materials curated through The Sociological Cinema included virtually no original video produced by sociologists and relied heavily on news stories, film and TV program clips, documentaries, and other one-off web-based videos gathered from a wide range of sites. Under contemporary conditions of rapid accumulation and continuous production, however, the instructional challenge has shifted toward organizing engagement with expanding content streams.
Approaching instructional media at the level of repositories rather than individual items shifts the analytic focus from what a given video explains to what kind of pedagogical objects repositories distribute over time. Repositories differ not only in topical coverage but also in their scale, orientation, pedagogical use, and durability as instructional resources. Under conditions in which instructional media are produced continuously and accumulate persistently, these differences become consequential for teaching practice. Repository-level thinking, therefore, requires attention to how instructional media are structured, stabilized, and reused across semesters, rather than treated as isolated artifacts selected for single instructional moments.
The remainder of the article formalizes these challenges by distinguishing among discovery, ongoing monitoring, and long-term pedagogical organization as analytically distinct problems with different infrastructural requirements. We then specify how low-cost monitoring and organizational workflows can support repository-level engagement over time, particularly in courses in which instructional relevance is reshaped by ongoing social, economic, and political change.
In pedagogical terms, these functions support the downstream ability to retrieve materials efficiently during planning and to apply them in teaching contexts where time, sequencing, and learning objectives constrain what can realistically be used. Although developed for online video, the framework is intended to generalize to a wide range of internet-based instructional materials used in contemporary higher education.
4. The Discovery, Monitoring, and Organization Problem
To address these multifaceted challenges, we distinguish among three analytically distinct but interrelated components of media engagement: discovery, ongoing monitoring, and long-term pedagogical organization (D–M–O). In practice, platform-centered search and recommendation systems, designed for episodic retrieval rather than sustained engagement, tend to collapse these distinctions. Under conditions of persistent growth in teaching-relevant media, this collapse becomes consequential, as instructors must locate new resources, remain aware of evolving repositories, and organize materials for future reuse (Jones, 2012; Whittaker, 2011).
Discovery refers to the episodic identification of stable content repositories rather than individual items. Monitoring denotes the ongoing, often automated maintenance of current awareness once repositories are known, shifting attention from memory-based checking to infrastructural support. Organization involves the selective retention, annotation, and indexing of materials for long-term pedagogical reuse.
These components differ in their temporal structure. Discovery is contingent and irregular, whereas monitoring and organization are cumulative processes that unfold over time. By contrast, platform-centered search models collapse discovery, monitoring, and organization into episodic retrieval, thereby obscuring the infrastructural requirements of sustained instructional media management.
Although discovery, monitoring, and organization describe the infrastructural conditions under which instructional media can be accumulated and indexed over time, their pedagogical value is most fully realized through retrieval. Retrieval involves locating relevant materials under the temporal and cognitive constraints that characterize teaching practice, where decisions must often be made quickly and in relation to specific learning objectives, course modules, or conceptual frameworks.
Even well-organized collections can fail pedagogically if instructors cannot readily recall or locate materials when needed. In this sense, discovery, monitoring, and organization function not as ends in themselves, but as supports for reliable retrieval.
Retrieval alone, however, does not ensure instructional impact. The pedagogical significance of instructional media emerges through application—the integration of retrieved materials into explanation, discussion, illustration, or analytical practice within instructional settings. Application transforms archived media into a didactic resource, enabling students to illustrate, contest, or render abstract concepts experientially visible. When media are successfully applied in the classroom, student responses often reinforce instructors’ judgments about teaching value, increasing the likelihood of future retrieval and reuse. In this way, discovery, monitoring, and organization support retrieval, while retrieval enables application, together forming a cumulative process through which media becomes incorporated into teaching practice over time.
Although this article is conceptual and methodological in orientation, its claims are grounded in systematic documentation of applied instructional media practices rather than abstract theorization alone. Specifically, our Discovery–Monitoring–Organization (D–M–O) framework is derived from and operationalized through sustained engagement with a real-world curation infrastructure for managing platform-based instructional videos over time. The appendices in this paper, therefore, function as repositories of empirical materials, documenting the selection criteria, monitoring routines, and organizational decisions through which the framework was enacted in practice. Rather than reporting interviews or surveys, the study offers practice-based grounding by making visible the infrastructural choices, disciplinary variation, and classificatory labor that structure how instructional media accumulates and is maintained within platform environments.
To illustrate how instructional videos accumulate differently across disciplinary contexts, Appendix A presents comparative repository-level starter collections in sociology and economics, demonstrating that discovery, monitoring, and organization pose distinct infrastructural challenges across fields. Appendix B then documents the RSS monitoring and social bookmarking workflow used to support these activities over time, detailing how discovery, ongoing awareness, and long-term pedagogical organization can be practically sustained under conditions of persistent digital accumulation. Together, these appendices document not only outcomes but the ongoing decision-making processes through which instructional media infrastructures are constructed and maintained.
4.1 Initial Discovery: Identifying Online Video Repositories
This section examines each D–M–O stage in turn, with particular attention to the limits of existing OVR discovery practices and institutional responses. The analysis is framed at the level of the social sciences, though the underlying infrastructural issues extend across disciplines.
The first challenge instructors encounter is becoming aware that relevant OVRs exist, a task that is analytically distinct from locating individual videos for immediate classroom use. In principle, discovery may occur through multiple channels, including platform search, professional networks, syllabus circulation, disciplinary journals, curated resource lists, newsletters, and institutional or project-based aggregation efforts. OVR discovery involves identifying websites, channels, or collections that consistently distribute pedagogically relevant content over time, enabling instructional practice to move beyond episodic searching toward sustained engagement with productive creators and sources (Burgess & Green, 2009; Cunningham & Craig, 2019).
In practice, instructors typically rely on keyword searches through platforms such as Google or YouTube, which are optimized to surface individual items rather than stable collections. Search results are shaped by engagement metrics, personalization histories, and recency biases, privileging popular or entertaining clips while obscuring repositories that may have accumulated substantial instructional value but lack algorithmic prominence (Noble, 2018). As a result, discovery practices tend to favor short-term selection over long-term instructional planning.
The problem with platform-centered search is not only that it treats instructional media as something to be found once and then forgotten. It also shapes what remains visible over time. Content that is institutionally supported, professionally branded, or rewarded by engagement metrics is repeatedly surfaced, while pedagogically valuable sources that do not align with platform signals fade from view. As a result, instructors are pulled back into repeated searching—not because monitoring and organization lack value, but because platforms provide little support for keeping important sources visible and retrievable across time.
This article does not propose a comprehensive method for OVR discovery, which varies substantially across disciplines and institutional contexts. Instead, it assumes that some repositories have already been identified and therefore focuses on the underexamined problem of sustaining engagement with them over time.
4.2 Variability by Discipline
As noted, the OVR discovery problem is uneven across fields. Economics, for example, benefits from a strong tradition of public-facing explanation, more centralized teaching venues that highlight digital resources, and greater institutional visibility of educational content streams. Others, including Sociology, exhibit a mismatch between the volume of available repository-level content and the visibility of mechanisms that ensure those repositories are routinely accessible to instructors. This variability affects both the extent of work instructors must undertake to identify stable sources and their continued reliance on chance discovery, informal networks, or platform algorithms. In economics, discovery is often scaffolded by centralized journals, policy institutes, and well-resourced public-facing organizations, whereas in sociology, repository discovery more frequently depends on informal circulation, classroom spillover, and episodic encounter.
4.3 Distinguishing Discovery, Monitoring, and Organization
Most contemporary platforms subsume OVR discovery, monitoring, and organization within a single activity, typically labeled “search.” Keyword queries and algorithmic recommendation systems are designed to retrieve items on demand. Still, they offer limited support for the ongoing, cumulative work required to track and manage instructional materials over time. Even after instructors identify productive repositories, they frequently return to the discovery stage, forced to relocate materials rather than build durable instructional collections. When discovery is mediated primarily through platform visibility, instructors are repeatedly returned to the point of initial encounter rather than supported in maintaining stable relationships with sources over time.
This conflation has pedagogical and infrastructural consequences. OVR discovery is contingent and visibility-dependent, whereas monitoring and organization can be routinized once repositories are known. The framework proposed here explicitly separates these stages, focusing its intervention on monitoring and organization, activities that become increasingly consequential as instructional media persist and accumulate over time.
Although platform algorithms significantly shape what content is visible through search and recommendation, this article does not evaluate their design or bias. Instead, it examines how instructors can develop monitoring and organization practices that reduce reliance on opaque discovery systems once repositories have been identified.
4.4 Integrating Monitoring and Organization as Infrastructural Practice
The distinction between discovery, monitoring, and organization has been recognized unevenly in prior work on current-awareness tools. Research in library and information science has examined how emerging web technologies reshape academic practices of staying informed, often emphasizing tools that surface new information or support personal collections (Tenopir et al., 2013).
The present article builds on this tradition by explicitly linking monitoring and organization into a unified, cumulative practice oriented toward long-term instructional use. Rather than treating RSS and social bookmarking as independent solutions, the framework integrates them into a faculty-managed knowledge infrastructure. In this formulation, “current awareness” is reconceptualized not as an episodic activity focused on discovery, but as an ongoing process that supports continuous monitoring, durable organization, and selective reuse of instructional media across courses and semesters.
4.5 Scaling Discovery, Monitoring, and Organization Across Course Types
The demands associated with discovery, monitoring, and organization do not scale uniformly across instructional contexts. In particular, courses organized around substantive social phenomena place qualitatively greater pressure on monitoring and organizational infrastructures than discipline-centered courses, because relevant instructional media are produced continuously across multiple fields, platforms, and genres rather than within a bounded disciplinary ecosystem. As a result, the relative importance of monitoring and organization increases sharply in such courses.
In discipline-centered courses, discovery is typically front-loaded and convergent. Once a core set of discipline-relevant OVRs has been identified—often reflecting professional associations, established educators, or widely recognized explanatory channels—the marginal returns to continued discovery decline. Monitoring practices stabilize as instructors track a relatively small number of repositories with predictable publication rhythms, and organization can rely heavily on disciplinary categories that already structure the field’s intellectual terrain. While discovery, monitoring, and organization remain necessary, their scale and complexity are constrained by the coherence and relative stability of the discipline itself.
By contrast, courses organized around substantive problems, such as social stratification and race and ethnic relations, exhibit fundamentally different scaling dynamics. In such courses, relevant instructional media are produced across multiple disciplines beyond sociology (e.g., economics, political science, psychology), as well as in adjacent fields such as journalism, public policy analysis, data visualization, and documentary filmmaking. Discovery remains ongoing rather than convergent, as new repositories continually emerge that address inequality-related mechanisms, outcomes, and cases from diverse analytic vantage points. The instructional challenge is therefore not simply identifying high-quality materials, but sustaining awareness of a broad, heterogeneous, and continuously evolving media environment over time.
Substantive-topic courses are further complicated by a heightened degree of dynamism. Because they are organized around visible social structures and processes rather than disciplinary canons, their instructional relevance is directly shaped by ongoing social change. Shifts in political regimes, policy agendas, cultural narratives, and institutional power relations routinely generate new empirical cases, reframe existing inequalities, and alter the interpretive stakes of long-standing theoretical debates. Periods of intensified ideological polarization—such as the rise of authoritarian movements, expanding forms of political repression, and sustained attacks on concepts associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion—produce rapid changes in how stratification is experienced, justified, contested, and represented in public discourse. Under such conditions, instructional materials can become outdated not over decades, but over semesters.
These conditions place particular strain on monitoring practices. Substantive-topic courses often require instructors to track dozens of active repositories operating across multiple platforms, many of which respond directly to unfolding events rather than stable curricular calendars. Without dedicated monitoring infrastructure, the cognitive burden of keeping pace with such material becomes prohibitive.
RSS-based aggregation provides a means of externalizing this task, enabling instructors to maintain current awareness while decoupling attention from continual searching or reactive content acquisition. As monitored feeds accumulate over time, they also support longitudinal engagement with shifting narratives, policy developments, and explanatory frames surrounding the substantive topic.
Organization demands scale even more sharply in substantive-topic courses. Because disciplinary categories no longer provide a shared organizing logic, instructors must impose analytic structure themselves in order to support retrieval, comparison, and reuse across instructional contexts. Materials must be indexed according to pedagogically salient dimensions, such as level of analysis, theoretical orientation, empirical focus, political framing, or instructional purpose, rather than disciplinary provenance alone. In this context, social bookmarking systems function not merely as storage tools, but as mechanisms for constructing and maintaining instructor-defined analytic order across a growing and politically volatile corpus of instructional media.
Together, these contrasts highlight that the D–M–O framework is most consequential in instructional contexts where discovery remains open-ended, monitoring must respond to rapid economic and political change, and organizational labor cannot be delegated to disciplinary conventions. Substantive-topic courses therefore represent scaling-intensive cases in which monitoring and organization infrastructures are not ancillary conveniences but essential supports for sustained pedagogical engagement under conditions of historical flux. Rather than reflecting idiosyncratic over-curation, such practices respond directly to the structural conditions under which instructional media are produced, circulated, contested, and rendered pedagogically salient.
5. An Instructional Infrastructure for Monitoring and Organizing Educational Content
The discovery of high-quality OVRs is not primarily a technical problem that can be solved solely with software tools. It is shaped by disciplinary norms, institutional visibility, professional networks, and publication practices that vary widely across fields. Accordingly, our framework begins after relevant OVRs have been identified. This delimitation does not minimize the importance of discovery; rather, it reflects the fact that discovery is shaped by structural conditions of visibility that extend beyond the scope of individual workflow design. It instead addresses the later stages of ongoing monitoring and long-term organization through an integrated instructional workflow, which prior research has identified as conceptually and practically underdeveloped (Jones, 2012; Whittaker, 2011).
In this article, “workflow” refers to the temporal sequencing of discovery, monitoring, and organizing activities rather than to specific steps, tools, or interfaces. Framed in D–M–O terms, the intervention focuses primarily on the monitoring and organization stages that follow the identification of productive OVRs.
5.1 Clarifying the Scope of the Framework
This section clarifies the scope of that intervention and specifies the tasks the framework is designed to support. It does not replace discovery practices or instructor judgment. Instead, it provides infrastructural support for two recurring tasks once repositories are known: (a) maintaining awareness of newly published content and (b) organizing selected materials so they remain retrievable and reusable across courses and semesters. In pedagogical terms, these functions support the downstream ability to retrieve materials efficiently during planning and to apply them in teaching contexts where time, sequencing, and learning objectives constrain what can realistically be used. While discovery is episodic and contingent, monitoring and organization are cumulative. The framework supports these cumulative processes by shifting them from individual memory and ad hoc practice into stable technical systems.
5.2 Why RSS Monitoring and Social Bookmarking Work Together
RSS monitoring and social bookmarking address complementary dimensions of instructional media management that neither technology resolves independently. We argue that RSS monitoring supports ongoing awareness by allowing instructors to subscribe to updates from known repositories. Instead of manually checking multiple sources, instructors can review consolidated notifications as new material is published (Miller, 2011, 2016; Tenopir et al., 2013).
Social bookmarking, by contrast, supports long-term organization and retrieval. Beyond browser bookmarks or platform-based “save” functions, social bookmarking systems enable flexible tagging, brief annotations, and retrieval using multiple criteria, such as course, topic, theoretical orientation, or instructional purpose (Whittaker, 2011).
Prior work by the first author (Miller, 2011) suggested the value of linking content monitoring and retention tools into coordinated instructional workflows rather than treating them as independent practices. Building on this insight, we treat these technologies as components of a two-stage instructional infrastructure: RSS surfaces new content, while social bookmarking supports organization by indexing and retaining selected items with contextual metadata. This alignment reflects instructional time horizons in which monitoring is continuous, and organization is selective.
A central advantage of integrating monitoring and organization in this way is that the framework scales across different instructional time horizons and organizational levels without requiring changes in underlying infrastructure. We distinguish continuous awareness from selective curation: RSS monitoring operates continuously in the background, whereas organization occurs during periodic curation sessions, when instructors index and evaluate materials for future use. This separation enables sustained current awareness without requiring constant manual intervention.
Our framework also accommodates variation in scope and depth of engagement. Discovery efforts may range from identifying a small number of repositories for a specific course to monitoring hundreds of sources across an entire discipline. Similarly, organizational practices may involve minimal tagging for basic identification or more detailed pedagogical metadata to support retrieval across multiple criteria. Individual instructors may emphasize focused discovery through selective, in-depth indexing, whereas collaborative or departmental efforts may pursue broader discovery alongside shared organizational standards. In each case, the same monitoring and organizational infrastructure supports both targeted individual use and more comprehensive collective curation, allowing instructional media management to scale without increasing cognitive or procedural complexity.
5.3 From Reactive Searching to Cumulative Teaching Libraries
Our integrated framework shifts instructional media use from reactive searching toward cumulative resource development. Rather than repeatedly reconstructing instructional materials through keyword searches, instructors can build teaching libraries that grow over time and across courses. Each curated item retains contextual information—its location, relevance, and brief instructional notes—supporting retrieval under the temporal and cognitive constraints of course preparation rather than reconstruction through repeated searching. Over time, these accumulated annotations can reduce preparation costs, support reuse, and facilitate adaptation as courses, curricula, or institutional conditions change.
5.4 Technology-Agnostic Design and Durability
Because specific RSS readers and social bookmarking platforms may change, our framework is intentionally technology-agnostic. Its durability lies in the underlying logic—automated monitoring paired with structured organization—rather than in dependence on any particular application or service. Instructors can migrate between tools without abandoning accumulated teaching libraries or organizational schemes.
This design principle addresses a common barrier to adoption: skepticism rooted in prior experiences with discontinued or degraded educational technologies. By emphasizing infrastructural functions rather than branded solutions, the framework aligns with long-term instructional practice rather than short-lived platform cycles (Weller, 2020).
5.5 Translating Curation Infrastructure into Instructional Practice
Our framework does not require advanced technical expertise. Its value lies in formalizing practices that can be adopted incrementally and adapted to different instructional contexts.
Individual instructors may begin by identifying a small number of productive OVRs, establishing lightweight routines for monitoring new content, and selectively archiving materials for reuse. Over time, such practices will build teaching libraries within social bookmarking systems that preserve pedagogical context and enable cross-course reuse.
Faculty development initiatives can treat instructional media management as a skill rather than as an incidental activity. Workshops may help instructors distinguish between discovery, monitoring, and indexing, develop sustainable curation routines, and adopt tagging practices aligned with instructional goals, without prescribing specific tools. Whether such practices become durable is likely to depend on institutional support, shared conventions, and recognition of curation as instructional labor.
Institutions can support distributed curation through guidance, shared conventions, and stable resources, such as curated repository lists, shared tagging vocabularies, and interoperable tools.
In this sense, discovery, monitoring, and organization operate not as abstract principles but as practical infrastructures whose form, labor demands, and pedagogical consequences are shaped both by institutional support and by the disciplinary environments in which instructional media is produced and reused.
The appendices that follow extend the analytic framework developed in the main text through comparative, discipline-specific illustration. Appendix A presents parallel starter collections of online video repositories in sociology and economics, designed not as exhaustive inventories but as typological demonstrations of how instructional media accumulates under different disciplinary conditions. Read comparatively, these cases make visible the distinct production logics, authority structures, and pedagogical labor that shape problems of discovery, monitoring, and organization across fields. Appendix B documents the monitoring and organizational infrastructure used to sustain engagement with those OVRs over time. The conclusion returns to these contrasts to synthesize their implications for instructional media infrastructure.
6. Conclusion: Curation as Pedagogical and Infrastructural Resilience
This article advances a comparative infrastructure framework for understanding the accumulation of instructional media across academic disciplines. Through parallel analyses of sociology and economics, we show that online video repositories embody distinct forms of pedagogical labor, authority, and scalability, producing discipline-specific challenges of discovery, monitoring, and organization. The D–M–O framework reframes instructional media engagement as an ongoing infrastructural practice rather than a series of isolated search decisions.
Over the past two decades, the expansion of online video has been enabled by broader technological changes in production and distribution (Burgess & Green, 2009; Weller, 2020). User-upload platforms such as YouTube have provided durable hosting, global distribution, and searchability for instructional content independent of institutional infrastructure, transforming instructionally relevant video from a scarce resource into an increasingly abundant one.
These changes have reshaped teaching practice. As distribution channels expanded, instructors became more willing to incorporate externally produced materials into lessons (Bennett et al., 2008; Kirkwood & Price, 2014). While this shift expands instructional possibilities, it also increases the volume of materials that could be monitored and organized over time.
Meanwhile, videos within many instructor-created online video repositories circulate in contexts with limited audience interaction, limited feedback, and few mechanisms that promote reuse beyond the originating course. Scalable curation infrastructures can increase visibility, selective reuse, and informal feedback, supporting instructional communities organized around shared topics or pedagogical approaches (Lobato, 2019; Palmer & Schueths, 2013). The relevance of these infrastructural conditions became especially visible during the rapid transition to remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed vulnerabilities in practices reliant on episodic searching and individual memory (Fyfield et al., 2021; Nguyen & Palmer, 2024).
The framework we propose addresses general instructional fragility rather than exceptional circumstances, emphasizing the infrastructural conditions that shape how instructional media are encountered, retained, and reused over time. By foregrounding repository-level engagement, it supports pedagogical continuity by enabling instructors to draw on curated resources, coordinate informally around shared materials, and adapt under constraint (Jones, 2012; Whittaker, 2011).
As illustrated in Section 4.5, these infrastructural demands are most acute in substantive-topic courses, such as social stratification, where instructional relevance is continually reshaped by ongoing social, economic, and political change. In such contexts, monitoring and organization are not supplementary enhancements but central pedagogical capacities that enable instructors to sustain analytic coherence amid rapidly evolving empirical conditions. In this respect, instructional infrastructures that support discovery, monitoring, and organization enable instructors to continually connect individual experiences and public narratives to shifting contemporary conditions, sustaining pedagogical relevance as biographies and social structures evolve in real time.
At the same time, the pedagogical significance of these infrastructural practices lies in what they enable instructors to do within instructional contexts. Discovery, monitoring, and organization create the conditions under which instructors can reliably retrieve relevant materials during course preparation and apply those materials in explanation, illustration, and discussion. Without retrieval and pedagogical application, curation activity risks becoming an end in itself rather than a support for teaching practice. By lowering retrieval friction and stabilizing access to previously identified resources, D–M–O practices help ensure that instructional media can be integrated into teaching at the moment it becomes pedagogically useful.
Over time, repeated cycles of retrieval and application transform instructional media from isolated discoveries into durable components of instructional repertoires. Materials that prove effective in the classroom become easier to recall, locate, and reuse, reinforcing the organizational structures that made their retrieval possible in the first place. In this way, low-cost curation practices do more than manage informational abundance; they enable instructors to incorporate continuously produced instructional media into stable teaching practice without requiring substantial technological infrastructure or institutional support.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence are likely to influence how instructors encounter, assess, and reuse instructional media. These developments, however, do not diminish the relevance of the infrastructural distinctions outlined here. Contemporary AI systems depend on structured inputs—stable content sources, accumulated materials, and durable metadata—to support tasks such as summarization, prioritization, and retrieval (Bender et al., 2021). As a result, the potential value of AI is greatest in contexts where discovery has already occurred and where monitoring and organization are sustained rather than episodic. Rather than collapsing discovery, monitoring, and organization into a single intelligent function, emerging AI tools are more likely to amplify the benefits of separating these stages, reducing the costs of ongoing engagement while leaving source selection and pedagogical judgment firmly in human hands.
The decision to adopt or not adopt systematic monitoring and organizing practices will shape how fully instructors can leverage the expanding array of online educational resources. In the absence of such practices, engagement with instructional media will remain episodic, limiting opportunities for cumulative refinement and reuse across courses and semesters. As a result, much of the instructional potential of internet-based content will remain only partially realized, not because relevant repositories are unavailable, but because they are not reliably monitored and organized over time.
In sum, curation operates as pedagogical infrastructure. Rather than treating online video as static resources assembled during course preparation, curation-oriented practices position instructional media as evolving artifacts embedded in continuing instructional, organizational, and collegial activity across courses, semesters, institutions, and disciplines.
Although we have centered on video in this article, the D–M–O distinction and the infrastructural conditions that support it can be extended to a range of digital sites, including podcasts, data visualizations, interactive graphics, and text-based materials. Our contribution, therefore, lies not in optimizing video use per se, but in providing general-purpose infrastructural support for instructors seeking to exploit the educational potential of the internet under conditions of sustained content abundance.
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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 monitoring 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 academic 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 illustrates how sociology video repositories can support accessible explanation, with pedagogy 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 illustrates how video can function as a medium for reflexive sociological practice, supporting theorization of 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 often invisible 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 illustrates how video repositories can function as disciplinary memory, memorializing knowledge production and sustaining continuity across generations of scholars.
Havens Wright Center for Social Justice
(Institutional Public Sociology, Social 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 illustrates how sociology video repositories can function as institutional movement infrastructure, preserving, circulating, and extending 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 illustrates how video repositories can function as sites of pedagogical resistance, archiving 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 illustrates how sociology can be practiced through cultural critique, with media analysis serving as a vehicle for sociological explanation and theoretical application.
Prof. David Stuckler
(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 illustrates how video can support reflexive professional practice in sociology, facilitating 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 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 illustrates how video repositories can function as integrated media practices, supporting research dissemination, pedagogical experimentation, and professional self-formation.
SOC 119
(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 illustrates how video repositories can support dialogic pedagogy, with accumulation taking the form of documented interaction and video serving as a record of teaching practice itself.
SociologistRay
(Public Sociology, Expert Commentary & Aspirational Testimony)
SociologistRay is a video repository created by Professor Rashawn Ray, whose work exemplifies contemporary public sociology at the intersection of empirical research, media commentary, and expert testimony. Drawing on original scholarship in race, policing, health disparities, and institutional power, the repository positions sociological knowledge as publicly accountable expertise rather than as detached academic analysis.
Videos frequently intervene in current events, policy debates, and media narratives, translating peer-reviewed research into accessible but authoritative commentary.
Accumulation occurs through conjunctural response rather than curricular sequencing: new videos are added as sociological expertise is called upon in moments of controversy, crisis, or public debate. Authority derives from research credibility and the visible labor of sociological interpretation in real time.
Importantly, the repository also documents Ray’s engagement with aspirational and uplift-oriented public sociology, particularly in relation to Black youth and social mobility. This dimension is visible in discussions of education, sport, mentorship, and opportunity structures, including work connected to the AIR Opportunity Fund and research on racialized pathways in athletics and schooling. These videos foreground community assets and future-oriented goals alongside structural critique, showing how sociological research can inform both diagnosis and intervention.
Monitoring is valuable because new videos reflect evolving social conditions, research agendas, and institutional initiatives rather than incremental conceptual coverage. Within the SOC 10, SociologistRay illustrates sociology as expert public engagement and aspirational testimony, where video makes visible how sociological knowledge circulates beyond the classroom to critique inequality while also articulating pathways toward collective and individual advancement.
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 illustrates how economics video repositories can function as long-term pedagogical assets built through sustained explanatory labor, oriented toward instructional completeness rather than persuasion.
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 illustrates how economics video repositories can function as public pedagogy, with accumulation reflecting 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 illustrates how institutional video repositories can function as policy translation infrastructures, accumulating pedagogical value through sustained engagement with matters of real-world economic governance.
Economics Media Library
(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 illustrates how curated repositories can function as pedagogical indexing infrastructures, where instructional power derives from organization and reuse rather than authorship.
(Working-Class Economics, Experiential Authority & Everyday Political Economy)
Gary’s Economics 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 illustrates how video repositories can function as ‘economics from below,’ where economic knowledge is articulated 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 illustrates how economics video repositories can operate as scaled ideological instruction, with professional media production and philanthropic funding enabling 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 illustrates how video repositories can support macro-level sensemaking, presenting economics as an interpretive framework for understanding complex, interconnected systems.
(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 illustrates how video can function as a medium for representing economics as contested knowledge, supporting disciplinary self-examination and reform.
Radical Discourse
https://www.emergentorder.com
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 illustrates how economics can be rendered as popular culture, with disciplinary ideas 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 illustrates how video can function as a tool for critical pedagogy, supporting 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/).
Pedagogical Goals and Video Use
Video-level bookmarks encode pedagogical goals that capture what instructional work a video is designed to perform, rather than what topic it covers or which theory it references. These goals provide a compact vocabulary for describing how videos operate pedagogically and for supporting retrieval under instructional constraints.
To operationalize pedagogical goals, this project draws on the typology developed by Andrist, Chepp, Dean, and Miller (2014) in their analysis of video use in sociology instruction. Although originally formulated in relation to sociology, the typology identifies modes of pedagogical mediation rather than discipline-specific content, making it applicable to instructional video across fields. In the present framework, the typology is extended to economics, with attention to how the distribution of goals may vary systematically by discipline, institutional location, and production context.
The typology identifies six pedagogical goals:
1. Propaganda: Videos oriented toward persuasion, advocacy, or the promotion of a normative or ideological position.
2. Testimony: Videos that foreground lived experience, situated authority, or expert witnessing as a source of pedagogical value.
3. Conjuncture: Videos that connect sociological or economic concepts to unfolding events, contemporary controversies, or current social conditions.
4. Infographics: Videos designed to compress, summarize, or stabilize factual or empirical information. In this framework, infographics are not limited to visual graphics or quantitative displays, but include any fact-heavy presentation that prioritizes evidentiary density over narrative development.
5. Pop culture: Videos that use shared cultural texts or media artifacts as entry points for sociological or economic analysis.
6. Détournement: Videos that repurpose, invert, or subvert dominant narratives or familiar representations to produce critical insight.
Pedagogical goals are assigned at the level of individual videos rather than entire repositories. A single video may serve multiple goals simultaneously, although one goal may be more pedagogically salient than others depending on instructional use. Goals are therefore treated as analytic descriptors rather than exclusive classifications.
Although goals are coded at the video level, repeated social bookmarking over time makes visible patterned concentrations of goals within repositories. These patterns are not treated as defining or fixed properties of OVRs, but as emergent tendencies produced through accumulation. As repositories grow, certain pedagogical goals may be privileged or repeatedly instantiated, reflecting creator orientation, institutional context, audience address, and production constraints. Observing these patterns supports comparative analysis across disciplines while preserving analytic precision.
Encoding pedagogical goals as tags within the social bookmarking system allows instructional judgments to be externalized and retrieved across courses and semesters. Rather than re-evaluating videos from scratch, instructors can draw on accumulated pedagogical memory to identify resources suited to specific teaching purposes, instructional moments, or classroom dynamics.
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.
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