YOUTUBE AS A COMPLEMENTARY LEARNING TOOL TO SUPPORT THE STUDY IN THE FIELD OF THERMAL ENGINEERING Ignacio Zabalza, Begoña Peña, Belen Zalba University of Zaragoza – Department of Mechanical Engineering (SPAIN) Abstract In recent years the use of Web 2.0 applications, including YouTube, wikis, social networks, blogs, etc. has spread to all areas, including higher education. Among these applications, YouTube is the most used in the educational field, being highly appreciated by university students. Currently, YouTube has more than 1,900 million users, and it is estimated that more than 1,000 million daily hours worldwide are spent watching Youtube videos, which are mainly accessed from mobile devices. Almost all universities have an institutional channel on YouTube in which in addition to disseminating the corporate image and their teaching and research activities, some teaching videos used in degree studies and Massive Open Line Courses (MOOC) are included. This paper presents the main activities carried out in a teaching innovation project financed by the University of Zaragoza (UZ, Spain) for the development and management of a YouTube channel which has been designed as a repository of instructional videos. This video collection together with a set of short self-assessment questionnaires has been used to support teaching in several related subjects in the field of Thermodynamics and Thermal Engineering. The paper aims to analyse the visualization statistics of the videos by using YouTube and Moodle Analytics, as well as the degree of satisfaction of the students with this innovation experience through a questionnaire. Likewise, the possible improvements obtained in the teaching-learning process are analysed and possible advantages or disadvantages associated with the use of videos as a complementary tool to traditional teaching are identified. The results show a high satisfaction degree among students with the videos produced and the self- assessment questionnaires as well as an improvement in the learning outcomes. Keywords: OCW, OER, instructional videos, teaching innovation, learning objects. 1 INTRODUCTION In recent years the use of Web 2.0 applications [1], including YouTube, wikis, social networks, blogs, etc. has spread to all areas, including higher education. YouTube is a platform that allows free sharing videos between distant users. The videos can be labeled and classified by topics. They can also be hosted in different channels that can be considered as repositories, which facilitates to carry out selective searches. Users can post comments or questions and express their opinion about the contents, which promotes interactivity. In addition, the videos can be linked, so that they can be accessible from social networks, learning management tools such as Moodle or other web pages, thus increasing their dissemination in a wide set of visualization environments [2]. At present, YouTube has local versions in 91 countries and is available in 80 different languages. It has more than 1,900 million users, which represents almost a third of the total number of Internet users. With respect to other social networks, it ranks second, behind Facebook. It is estimated that more than 1,000 million daily hours of videos hosted on this platform are viewed worldwide, with more than 70% accessed from mobile devices [3]. Considering the number of visitors and views, YouTube is placed in the top 2 of websites, just behind Google [4]. According to several authors, the use of educational videos facilitates autonomous learning and can be a useful tool applicable in different teaching-learning contexts such as the flipped classroom model [5-6] or blended learning [7]. Although both students and teachers generally agree on the positive effects of the use of videos to improve the learning process, their perceptions are not always coincident and it is necessary to carry out more research in this regard [8]. Almost all Spanish universities have an institutional channel on YouTube [9] in which, in addition to disseminating their corporate image and their teaching and research activities, they disseminate Proceedings of EDULEARN19 Conference 1st-3rd July 2019, Palma, Mallorca, Spain ISBN: 978-84-09-12031-4 5164