Crash Course Team Q+A! (Patreon)

The Crash Course team discussed some of your questions this month in slack. Here, they talk about their histories as a part of Crash Course, and how to find good learning resources.

Anonymous: How long have you worked at Crash Course and how has it changed since you started?

Julia Bluhm, Communications Coordinator: I started working at Complexly in May 2020, and have been involved with Crash Course since then. (I do social media, so I also work on some other Complexly shows!). One change since the early pandemic days is that everyone seems to have really mastered working and making Crash Course remotely. I imagine that was a huge change from the "before times," when everything happened at one of the two offices. So, go team!

Stan Muller, Producer: I started working for John part-time in August 2011. One of my first duties was to help with a pitch for the YouTube Creator Fund. When Crash Course got funded in October, I came on full-time to produce the World History series. The biggest change for me from the old days is the size of the teams. When we got that initial grant, the Indianapolis office consisted of John and I sharing a small office inside another business. I sat at a little desk with a giant workstation on it, and John sat in a recliner behind me looking over my shoulder. We hired a writer, partnered with Thought Cafe for animation, and started making these things. It seemed like an impossible undertaking for such a small team. Nowadays, we have an amazing team that focuses on accuracy, tone, fact-checking, and educational standards all the way through the process. The finished episodes are way more useful for teachers and learners thanks to the collaboration of our team.

Brandon Brungard, Producer: I started working at what-is-now-called-Complexly in December of 2013. I think I was like employee 4 or 5 in the Indianapolis office. Back in those days we took all our meetings on Stan's couch and Mark (now Complexly's Art Director) worked in a closet! My first day I edited an episode of Crash Course US History and have been working on it weekly ever since (so going on 9 years this December). At that time, we'd just hit 1 million subscribers I believe but there was still quite a bit of uncertainty about if and how the channel could survive long term. We had just met with who would become our longest running partner, PBS Digital, Subabble was a new thing Hank was really excited about, and Patreon still didn't exist. Like Stan mentioned, we wore far too many hats back then and have definitely learned the value of bringing in more voices to help us make our content more accurate, inclusive, and useful.

Hannah Bodenhausen, Producer: I've worked at Crash Course for just over two years! I started in February 2020 as an editor, but I was still in college and worked part time remotely, so even though the pandemic created a big shift for everyone else, it didn't affect me much at the time. I just kept doing what I was doing, while also finishing my last semester of school online. The biggest change since I've started is the Crash Course team coming together as one unit, rather than split between Missoula and Indianapolis based teams. With most of our team being fully remote now, there's not really any need for that distinction and we all collaborate and share ideas across our series a lot more, which I think has been great! Another big change for me personally is that Crash Course Organic Chemistry posts its final episode tomorrow (as I'm writing this)! This series was in pre-production for months before I started working at Crash Course, it was the first series I edited, and now after 2 years it's finally coming to an end. I'll miss working on it a lot, but I'm so happy it's fully out in the world and excited for what I get to work on next!

Katie Brink (Production Coordinator): I started working at Crash Course in March 2022, but I've been a subscriber since Crash Course debuted during my freshman year of high school! Not many changes to report on from the short time I've been here, but I'm super excited to support the team in accomplishing our future goals :)

Rita: When you are trying to find the most accurate or non-biased sources when studying history, where do you start? I’m homeschooling my daughter and we try to use a variety of sources, including CC. The differences we find can be confusing sometimes.

Katie Brink (Production Coordinator): ​​We link our sources in the YouTube descriptions of our videos, so that's a great place to start looking for further reading recommendations!

Stan Muller (Producer): I was going to write a long answer about the implicit bias involved in choosing what to include and what to omit when writing history, and how no single source can capture an objective truth, and how we have to at some point put our trust in the academic community and our institutions and experts to help us decide on something approaching truth. But it's possible that a homeschooler might not have a ton of trust in institutions and experts. I'd go with Katie's answer.  And maybe edit it to say we usually link our sources. I know it wasn't that consistent in the early days.

Shuback: Are there any images you show in your videos that are in a gray area, from a fair-use perspective? How do you decide what's allowed?

Brandon Brungard, Producer: Oh boy. This could be an entire course itself!

We try really hard to make sure that we've secured permission to use everything you see in our videos so pretty much all content is either licensed, in the public domain, or falls under a creative commons license appropriate for our use. That said, if you know where to go looking, you can find a ton of amazing stuff that's free to use. For most of our historic content we love the Library of Congress and also use a ton of institutional archives (NASA, NOAA, USGS, NYPL, DPLA, MET, Smithsonian Open Access -- it's seems like there's a handful of great ones for every topic). Also, community archives like Archive.org, Wikimedia Commons, and even Flickr can be great though sometimes take a bit more sleuthing. For most other stuff we'll license through the traditional stock websites you've probably heard of -- Shutterstock, Getty, iStock, Pond5, Alamy. And of course if we can't license that way, we'll reach out to content owners whether that's an institution or someone's linkedin!