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Category: Project

Description: “How to”-videos on YouTube have become a popular source for procedural learning. An important difference to traditional educational videos is that the protagonist is in most cases not a professional teacher. Building on work on social learning from models, this paper explores the role of the protagonist by looking at model-observer similarity, source credibility and conversational human voice as protagonist variables. A survey (n = 401) among active Internet users was conducted. The majority has used YouTube and has watched “How to”-videos on YouTube. Respondents preferred videos with protagonists that they perceived as experts and trustworthy, and who talked in a conversational human voice. Protagonists of the same sex were also preferred, especially by males. The protagonist variables explained variance in perceived usefulness and intention to use “How to”-videos above and beyond the technical and instructional quality of the video. However, only conversational human voice and same sex of the protagonist turned out as significant predictors of perceived usefulness and intention to use.