Creativity in Crisis: a Journey into YouTube

Crisis comes with dangers and opportunities. Necessity is the mother of invention. This article explores creativity in crisis in the academic context from my personal perspective. This pandemic and stay-at-home order necessitates academic activities, teaching, in particular, to transition to a remote format. The loss of physical space, in-person contact, and taken-for-granted everyday activities comes with major concerns and requires major adjustment. The stay-at-home order necessitates rethinking teaching and learning—not just the delivery of content but the content itself, the practice of academia in general. Much of it involves increased usage of familiar and unfamiliar technologies, experimenting with different formats, and brings relevance to the course content to these circumstances. In short, the current situation requires reexamining one’s relationship with technologies and some degree of creativity in a broad sense. This creativity can also lead one into new and unexpected realms—such as the increased reliance of YouTube, not as a user, but as a creator of videos. This article will involve a selection of diverse short video clips for educational purposes that emerged out of this crisis situation.