Abstract
In fall 2014 we started the development of a series of short YouTube videos to help our introductory physics students better comprehend concepts they tend to find challenging. Our work is inspired by the PhD thesis of Derek Muller (author of the Veritasium channel) showing that lecture-based videos tend to be not only ineffective, but actually reinforce students’ misconceptions and increase their confidence in the wrong idea. Muller shows that better learning outcomes can be achieved if videos are based on dialogue and purposefully address misconceptions. Muller used the dialogue between a student and a teacher, but we decided to go a step further to create videos that mimic the dialogue between two students who know how to work constructively together. The idea is to address misconceptions head-on and to model good study habits. The students on these videos also make explicit their metacognitive skills by explaining what is confusing them and checking that things make sense.