The best educational YouTube channels for video inspiration

Looking for inspiration for your next video lessons or training materials? Then, this is the blog for you.

We're sharing 9 of our favorite educational YouTube channels, packed with creative animations, clever techniques and most of all, fun! Through these channels, you'll learn lots of new ideas for your own videos and get inspired to take your content to the next level.

Read on to learn exactly why we love these channels so much and don't forget, you can create your own educational video for free, simply click below to start a 7-day trial.

1. Teachings in Education

Specializes in: teaching strategies and general knowledge.

Why we love this channel: each video builds to a full picture. When subjects are tackled in sections, it can be difficult to piece the information together to get a full understanding. Instead channel founder, Frank Avella will dive into sections of a subject and then zoom out to help us see how that element relates to the rest of the topic. This is a really effective way of building context and solidifying the content in our minds.

2. Funza Academy

Specializes in: Math and Science.

Why we love this channel: for its expressive and engaging voice-overs. It's the combination of movement, imagery and sound that make videos so effective for learning and so ensuring your voice-over strikes the right tone is just as important as your visuals. In these videos, the narrator adds emphasis to certain words, asks questions and pauses at the right moments to keep us listening. If you're recording your own voice-over it's easy to become monotone so make sure you change pitch and tone to keep your viewers engaged.

You can find all our tips on recording a professional sounding voice-over in our guide.

3. Miss Cole

Specializes in: English literature.

Why we love this channel: for its creative concepts. Miss Cole sets the scene for learning with the idea of 'exploding the quote' and 'blowing up the language'. This animated take on analyzing literature is fun, different and gets our attention. That's exactly the effect you want to create with your videos to keep students engaged and listening.

So how could you reinvent your content to find a new angle or way to present it?

4. Dr. Aiden

Specializes in: English literature (specifically Shakespeare).

Why we love this channel: we're guided through the content. Shakespearean text can seem overwhelming when you're trying to absorb whole pages or sections of content and it's difficult to really understand the meaning of the words. What we love about Dr. Aiden Elliott's videos is the way he presents a passage and then uses visuals like lines, arrows and related images to draw our attention to the important phrases. By doing this he's holding our hand through the information and making it much easier to take meaning from the text.

This works especially well for literature but could equally be applied to lots of other subjects. Whether it's sections of equations, music or periods in history.

5. The Art of Improvement

Specializes in: personal development.

Why we love this channel: it sets a great pace. Channel founder, Adam Holownia not only helps viewers take the core messages from personal development books, but he keeps us engaged with the speed of the video. Adam ensures each animation is slow enough to understand but fast enough that you don't lose interest and get distracted.

Speed is an important consideration for any video so make sure your next animation strikes the right balance. You can learn more about Adam's approach to creating videos and how he started his channel in our interviews with him.

6. GrammarSongs by Melissa

Specializes in: grammar, reading and writing.

Why we love this channel: its use of characters. Channel founder, Melissa uses cute characters like the owl in this video to keep younger students engaged and help them remember tricky grammar rules. Each video has different characters or voices associated with it that helps children understand and remember the information more easily.

So why not get creative and develop your own characters that form part of your channel and keep students coming back?

If you'd like to learn more about how Melissa started and grew her YouTube channel, you can read our interview with her here.

7. Osmosis

Specializes in: health and medicine.

Why we love this channel: the custom animations. The Osmosis videos all feature awesome custom animations that are super specific to the topic. This investment in graphics really pays off because we can piece the information together so much faster and easier.

So if you're creating videos on a very specific or niche subject and can't find the right images to suit your message, seize the opportunity to create your own. We have help and guidance on how you can create your own SVGs (scalable vector graphics) here.

8. The Swedish Investor

Specializes in: personal finance.

Why we love this channel: the humor and fun. While personal finance is an important topic, content on it can be on the drier side which is why we're such fans of The Swedish Investor. Founder, Erik Abrahamsson takes content that can be dense and difficult to understand and makes it approachable and fun with entertaining graphics, voices and captions.

This is really clever because it keeps us watching the video to see what will happen next. So if you can, try to inject some humor into your educational videos because it puts us in a better mood for learning.

9. Practical Psychology

Specializes in: psychology and personal development.

Why we love this channel: use of camera movement to reinforce storytelling. In this video, Practical Psychology cleverly use small movements of the camera to show the difference between photographic memory and eidetic memory, switching between the two to build up a picture of each. This is a really effective way of comparing two ideas without creating lots of extra images or frames that could leave the viewer lost.

Have you considered how you could use the camera position to your advantage? Learn how here.