The Vision behind WatchKnowLearn is simple:
To provide a world-class, online domain on which educators can store, categorize, and rate the best, K – 12 educational videos on the Internet today. And to make this service FREE so teachers, parents and students everywhere may have access to those videos.
To make this a reality, we invite teachers, instructors and educators to suggest videos for inclusion into our directory, and then to review, approve, and assign those videos into appropriate categories using a wiki framework and philosophy. The videos are the highest quality found on the Internet, cover all major educational topics from elementary to secondary schools (or age range 1 – 18), and are Kid Safe because they are vetted by teachers.
WatchKnowLearn has indexed approximately 50,000 educational videos, placing them into a directory of over 5,000 categories. The videos are available without any registration or fees to teachers in the classroom, as well as parents and students at home 24/7. Users can dive into our innovative directory or search for videos by subject and age level. Video titles, descriptions, age level information, and ratings are all edited for usefulness. Our Web site invites broad participation in a new kind of wiki system, guided by teachers. WatchKnowLearn does not itself host videos—we serve as a library for links to excellent educational videos that have been selected by educators.
WatchKnowLearn is managed by the non-profit St. Charles Place Education Foundation located in Memphis, TN, and is directed by Walt Henley PhD graduate student at The University of Memphis (available at whenley@memphis.edu). WatchKnowLearn has a dedicated team of editors who provide oversight of the videos recommended by our diverse user population. Our editors are teachers and educational professionals who have spent many years studying their respective fields of interest. All of our editors possess a strong commitment to providing the highest quality of education to our users.
In 2008, a Memphis-area philanthropist invited Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, Ph.D. to design and launch a new, educational video library that would be managed collectively by practicing teachers using a wiki philosophy. Dr. Sanger served as the initial Executive Director for the the project, along with Walt Henley as the Marketing Director. Kerry Matthews, WatchKnowLearn’s former Director of Education served as interim Director in 2014. In 2015, Walt Henley returned as Executive Director after working on his Ph.D. at the University of Memphis. Since its inception, the website has shown over 50 million free educational videos to a US national and global audience of over 1 billion classroom students.
Our contributors and editors select outstanding videos from many different domains including the websites listed below: