What Is YouTube Really Good For? The Biggest Free School There Is, and How to Use It

Most people open YouTube to be entertained. It is also the largest collection of free lessons ever put in one place. You can learn from it by watching. You can also learn from it by reading, because nearly every video has its words written out, in a place that is easy to never notice. This article shows how much is in there, the two ways to get it out, and a short exercise that makes a lesson stick. It gives the exercise two ways: by yourself, and with an AI to help.

What's in the rest of this article

• How much is in there — the size of it, and what people use it to learn.
• One man who used it as a school — a world champion whose coach was YouTube.
• Two ways to learn from a video — watching it, and reading it.
• The catch — why watching alone often leaves you with nothing.
• The exercise — five steps that turn one video into something you know, using nothing but YouTube.
• The second way — the same thing with an AI helper, for people who are comfortable with one.
• By hand, or with a lot less work — doing it yourself, and the tool that does the slow part.

How much is in there

YouTube says more than 20 million videos are uploaded to it every day.

A great many of them teach something. You can find how to change a tire, how to play a chord, how a mortgage works, how to write a résumé, how a heat pump heats a house, and what a new law does. Whatever you are trying to figure out, someone has probably explained it on camera.

Whole college courses are there for free. MIT has put more than 2,500 of its courses online. In 2023 Arizona State University, YouTube and the Crash Course team put the lessons for four first-year college classes on YouTube. NBC News reported the terms at the time: watching cost nothing, the full online class cost $25, and college credit cost $400.

People already use it this way. In 2018 Pew Research Center asked YouTube users how important the site was for figuring out how to do things they had never done before. Fifty-one percent said very important. YouTube's own count, published in April 2026, is that learning and how-to videos drew more than 5.5 billion views in the United States in a single month.

It is good for more than learning a skill. A student can use it to research a paper. A writer can use it to find out what the people who do a job say about it. Someone who makes videos or a newsletter can use it to see what has already been said and what has not.

One man who used it as a school

In 2009 a young Kenyan named Julius Yego started going to the internet cafe closest to his village to watch javelin videos on YouTube. Kenya is known for its runners. There was no javelin coach near him. So he watched champion throwers. Then he went home and threw what he had seen.

Six years later, in Beijing, he threw 92.72 meters and won the world title. The Associated Press called him the first Kenyan ever to win one in a field event. Reporters asked who his coach was. As Julius Yego told CNN, "I told them, 'YouTube.'"

He also told Vice something worth keeping: "YouTube can only take you so far." He later worked with a real coach. The videos got him started. What he did after watching did the rest.

Two ways to learn from a video

The first way is to watch. For anything you do with your hands, the picture is the lesson. You see where the fingers go, and you copy them.

The second way is to read. Every video with captions has its words written out as text. That written copy is called a transcript. Picture a classroom where the textbook is taped under every desk. It is easy to miss. David, who runs this site, uses YouTube many times a day. "I had no clue that they had a transcript," he said. "It's not obvious."

Reading matters most when the words are the lesson: how a credit score works, what a doctor says about a medicine, what a law changes. Reading is usually faster than listening. You can skip to the part you need. You can check exactly what was said. And you can keep it.

The catch

Watching a video feels like learning. Often it is not.

You have probably done this. You watch a how-to video. It all makes sense while it plays. A day later you cannot do the thing, or even explain it to someone else. Think of a cooking show: an hour of it leaves you hungry and no better at cooking.

Michael Kardas and Ed O'Brien tested this at the University of Chicago in 2018. People watched a skill over and over. The more they watched, the better they thought they would be. Then they tried, and the people who had watched more did no better. "The more that people merely watch others, the better they think they can perform the skill themselves," Michael Kardas said.

So the videos are not the weak part. A man with no javelin coach reached a world title on them. The weak part is watching and then doing nothing with it.

The exercise

One short exercise helps with this. We are going to do it together.

You choose something you want to understand. You go through five short steps. When you finish, you can close the video and still tell someone what you learned.

You need YouTube and something to write on. The whole exercise takes about fifteen minutes. You can listen to this all the way through first, and do the exercise later.

To show each step, we will use one example. Say you want to understand what makes a credit score go up or down.

1. Decide what you want to learn. That way you know exactly what you are looking for.
2. Find one short, recent video. That way you learn from one good video and not five bad ones.
3. Get the words. That way you can read the lesson.
4. Read first, then watch only the part you need.
5. Close the video and say it from memory. That helps it stay.

Step 1 of the exercise: Decide what you want to learn

What this step does. It gives you a target small enough to hit tonight. Without it, you watch for an hour and never know if you are done.

What to do. Say, in one sentence, the one thing you want to be able to explain. If you could not finish it tonight, make it smaller.

In our example. "Understand credit" is too big. "Know the things that make up a credit score, and which ones count the most" is one evening. That sentence is also what you will type into the search box.

Step 2 of the exercise: Find one short, recent video

What this step does. It gets you one video worth your time, from someone you have a reason to trust.

What to do. Search for your sentence in plain words. On the results page, open Filters and choose a recent upload date, because an old lesson can teach you something that is no longer true. Pick a video under fifteen minutes.

Then take ten seconds to see who is teaching. Tap the channel's name and read its About line. Ask who this is and what they sell. Read the top few comments as well. Sometimes viewers point out a mistake there.

Do not go by the number of views. A 2022 review led from Khalifa University looked at studies that had graded more than twenty thousand YouTube health videos. Views and likes were no guide to which ones were good.

In our example. You search "what makes up a credit score." One video is from a channel that sells credit repair. It has a reason to make your score sound broken. You pick a different one.

Step 3 of the exercise: Get the words

What this step does. It turns the video into something you can read: the transcript, the written copy from earlier. You can see the whole lesson at once.

What to do. On a computer:

1. Click "more" under the video's title to open the description.
2. Scroll to the very bottom.
3. Click "Show transcript."
4. A panel opens with the words, line by line. Click a line and the video jumps to that spot.

YouTube gives viewers no button to save those words. To keep them, you select the text and copy it out by hand.

Guides to the phone app say the transcript is in the same place, in the description. You can read it there, but there is no button to copy it out.

If there is no "Show transcript," the video may have no captions. Pick another video.

In our example. You open the transcript of the credit score video. The whole lesson is now on one screen.

Step 4 of the exercise: Read first, then watch only the part you need

What this step does. It saves you from sitting through the whole video. You go straight to the part that answers your sentence from step 1.

What to do. Skim the transcript. Find the lines that answer your question. Click the first of those lines, and the video jumps there. Watch that part and nothing else.

Before you un-pause, say the rule back in your own words. If you cannot say it, play that part again.

In our example. You find the lines where the teacher lists the parts of a score. You watch those two minutes. Then you say: "Paying on time counts the most. How much of my limit I am using comes second."

Some lessons are for your hands, like a guitar chord or a leaky faucet. There the picture is the lesson. Use the transcript to find the moment, then do the thing with your hands while the video plays.

A video cannot see you. For wiring, medicine or your savings, use it to learn enough to ask a licensed person good questions.

Step 5 of the exercise: Close the video and say it from memory

What this step does. It makes the lesson stay. This is the step people skip, and it has strong proof behind it.

In 2006 Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke found that students who recalled a passage from memory remembered more of it a week later than students who read it again. The students who reread it felt more sure. A week later they remembered less.

What to do. Close the video. Do not look back. Tell what you learned to the next person you see, or type three lines in your notes. Then open the transcript and check what you missed.

In our example. You type: the parts of a credit score, and the two that count the most. You check, and you had left one part out. Now you know it.

That is the end of the exercise. You started with a question and you finished able to explain the answer. Tomorrow, name the next small thing.

The exercise again, in five lines

1. Decide what you want to learn, small enough to finish tonight.
2. Find one short, recent video on exactly that, and see who made it.
3. Get the words.
4. Read first, then watch only the part you need, and say it back.
5. Close the video and say it from memory.

The second way: let an AI write out the steps for you

The exercise above uses nothing but YouTube. If you are comfortable with an AI chat tool, there is a second way, and it is faster.

It is the method David used to teach himself to build software with AI tools. He did not sit and watch. He pulled the words out of the videos, gave them to ChatGPT and Claude, and had them write out step-by-step instructions. Then he followed the steps. "It's how I do everything now," he said. What he builds with it is a bigger subject, for a later article. This is the beginner's version.

What this way does. It turns twenty minutes of talking into a short numbered list, written for a beginner, in the order to do things.

What you need. YouTube and a free AI chat tool. ChatGPT and Claude both have a free version.

The second way, step by step

What to do. Steps 1, 2 and 3 are the same as before. Decide what you want to learn. Find one short, recent video and see who made it. Get the words. Do step 3 on a computer, because you have to copy the words out.

Then, instead of reading the transcript yourself, hand it over. Open ChatGPT or Claude. Paste in the words you copied. Type something like this:

"This is the transcript of a video. Turn it into step-by-step instructions for a complete beginner. Number the steps. Put them in the order I should do them. Explain any word I might not know. Use only what is in this transcript."

That last sentence matters. An AI can add things the video never said, and it can get things wrong. Telling it to stay inside the transcript helps. For anything about your health or your money, check the important points against the video itself.

Now work down the list. When you do not understand a step, ask in plain words: "I do not understand step three. Explain it another way." The AI still has the transcript, so it can answer from the video.

Finish the same way as before. Close everything and say it from memory.

In our example. You paste in the transcript of the credit score video and ask for the steps. You get back a numbered list: what a credit score is, the parts that make it up, which ones count the most, and what to look at first. You ask one question about a word you did not know. Then you close the laptop and tell someone what you learned.

By hand, or with a lot less work

You can do all of this yourself, for free, either way.

The slow step is the same in both ways. It is the third one: opening the panel, copying the words out by hand, and doing it again for the next video. On a phone, the guides say, you can read the words but there is no button to take them with you.

If you would like that step done for you, our Transcriber does it. Paste the video's link, click "Get Transcript," and the words appear, ready to read and copy. That part is free up to a limit: three free uses a month in your browser, shared across the site's tools, or three transcripts a day with the free desktop app for Mac and Windows. If a video has no captions, there may be nothing to fetch.

What else you can do with the words

Getting the words is the start. The Transcriber page has a button that sends them on to DIDE, our Dumb It Down Engine. DIDE turns the words into thirty different things, in five groups: learn it, use it at work, make content from it, research it, and sell with it.

Three of the thirty are free: the Explainer, the Quick Summary and the Glossary. The rest come with a subscription. These are the ones that help most when you are learning:

• How-To Checklist turns what the video teaches into numbered steps you can do. It is the second way from this article, done for you.
• Explain It to a Kid explains the whole topic so a curious ten-year-old gets it.
• Study Guide gives you the big ideas, the key examples, the terms and questions to study from.
• Q&A Flashcards makes question-and-answer cards, so you can test yourself.
• Quick Summary is a two-minute version with the key points. It is free.
• Glossary defines the words a new reader needs. It is free.

If you make things for other people, the same tool writes a newsletter article, a blog article, a YouTube script, an X thread or a lesson plan from those words.

The Transcriber page has eight quick outputs of its own for subscribers, such as Key Points and Explain Like I'm New.

The Transcriber is on our website at undastandable.com, and it hands the words to DIDE from there. Press "Show me how this works" on the Transcriber page for a short demonstration.

Deciding what to learn, checking the teacher, and doing the thing are still yours.

Where to start

YouTube is the biggest free school there is. The lessons are already there, more of them than anyone could ever watch, and the words of nearly every one are written out under the video.

Watching is the easy part, and it is the part that does not stick. What makes a lesson yours is what you do with it: get the words, do the thing, and say it back.

So pick one thing this week. Find one video. Run the exercise once, either way.

Then, when someone asks who taught you, you can give Julius Yego's answer.

Words used in this article

Sources

• Uploads per day: YouTube press page
• MIT OpenCourseWare: MIT News, 2024-03-12
• Free college classes on YouTube: NBC News, 2023-01-25
• Half of users say it is very important for learning to do new things: Pew Research Center, 2018-11-07
• 5.5 billion views of learning and how-to videos: YouTube Official Blog, 2026-04-28
• Julius Yego: AP via VOA, 2016-07-22; CNN, 2016-08-12; Vice, 2016-08-16
• Watching raises confidence, not skill: Kardas and O'Brien, Psychological Science, 2018; University of Chicago Booth press release
• Views and likes are no guide to quality: Osman et al., BMC Medical Education, 2022
• Where the transcript is: AnySpeech guide, 2026
• What makes up a credit score: myFICO, "What's in my FICO Scores?"
• Recalling beats rereading: Roediger and Karpicke, Psychological Science, 2006