I was listening to a programme on BBC Radio 4 a few weeks ago. That makes me feel old already. Quite recently a young man saw the radio that I keep to hand, an old and very bulky set that is all AM, and has extra wave bands for long wave and short wave, and he asked me whether people still listen to radios. Well, yes, I do. But we are getting fewer.

Anyway, the programme is now a podcast, so I can do modern as well. The programme / podcast is called “The Great Influencer Experiment”, and it took three people, a potter, a historian and a performance artist, who decided to take their skills to the Internet, and become influencers. Somewhere around the second programme in a three programme series, the protagonists hit the influencer’s dilemma. (They all hit it, but they each hit it individually, which is why I have positioned the apostrophe to indicate that the dilemma has only one owner.) Each had embarked on their course as an influencer for their own personal satisfaction, to make their offering available to more people, and to present an authentic version of themselves. But then there are the numbers. Should they pursue the subscribers, the views and the likes.

That rang very true for me. I have been running my YouTube channel for four months now, and I feel my experience is reaching some kind of point, but I am not sure yet whether it is a crisis point, a turning point or some other kind of point. Something has changed. At first when I told people I was going to have a YouTube channel, or that I had just started, they were very encouraging. Now, if they remember, they ask me how it is going. At which, of course, I show my outrage; if they have to ask, they obviously have not subscribed. So that is the first lesson that YouTubing gives. You have to be absolutely ruthless about exploiting other people’s guilt.

But the second lesson is that, like the influencers in The Great Influencer Experiment, I started to notice the numbers. And the numbers tell me that the videos that get the most views are the simple how-to-do-it videos. And the videos that I think are important, that address the deeper questions, attract much less attention. So it seems that postgraduate students want simple recipes that explain how to manage different aspects of their research. Shall I, in John Steinbeck’s words, cut out the hoop-de-doodle, and get right down to the business, or am I going to stay true to myself. And true to myself, as I always explained to students in person, is to say, “This is complicated. That is why there are courses on it in a university. If it wasn’t complicated, it wouldn’t be in a university”.

On the other hand, as my bad angel tells me, there is no point in being an influencer if nobody is watching. In fact, you are probably not an influencer at all if nobody watches.

As a responsible YouTube channel proprietor (I am having trouble with verbs to go with YouTube) I have, naturally, checked out the competition, And there are plenty of people out there who want to give advice to postgraduate researchers. And plenty who say, “This ontology / epistemology / methodology / this-that-or-the-other-ology is very complicated. We can make it simple for you; it’s quantitative or qualitative, and if you cannot be arsed to make a decision (technical term from the Internet) why not say you are doing mixed methods?” And when I was a flesh and blood person, IRL, I hated it. Is the price of being an influencer that you can only disseminate ideas that are already influential.

As with all other aspects of comparative and international education, there are no simple answers. You will have to judge for yourself. Just search for “” on YouTube. No pressure.

David Turner

Professor David Andrew Turner is Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of South Wales, UK, and Professor at the Institute for International and Comparative Education (IICE), Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.

He has extensive experience of teaching in schools and universities in the UK, including working as admissions tutor for several postgraduate programmes. He is the author of several books, including Quality in Higher Education (Sense Publishing, 2012) and Theory and Practice of Education (Continuum Books, 2007), as well as numerous scholarly articles in peer reviewed journals.

His research interests range across Comparative Education, Higher Education, Education Policy and Leadership and Management in Education.