Boston University students working with the Global Nomads Group — an international nonprofit organization that aims to connect young people around the world via the internet — have started a new initiative known as the Content Creation Lab to allow teenagers and students aged 13 to 19 years old to create educational content to share with their peers.
The New York-based Global Nomads Group intends to foster “cross-cultural dialogue within youth all over the world,” according to Intern Coordinator and Program Co-Leader Ezgi Eyigor, a senior studying psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Under the guidance of interns, Eyigor said, adolescents from countries around the globe — including Ecuador, Jordan, Turkey and South Africa — create videos and learning modules to share their knowledge and experiences on a variety of topics with other students.
“Content Creation Lab was created in order to give the power to youth,” Eyigor said, “to create for youth, to design for youth.”
The four main issues covered in the last year were human rights, sports, mental health and women’s rights, she said, adding that the topics were chosen by the participating youth themselves.
Eyigor said the Lab was born when she and her fellow interns tried and failed to find an educational video on the concept of social biases and how to overcome them.
“We were looking for a video that could help us out with talking about bias and how it works in our brain and in our personal lives,” Eyigor said. “We just couldn’t find one.”
Aiming to further the mission of international education for youths under the GNG, Eyigor said she and her associates decided to simply make one of their own.
“Long story short, we produced,” Eyigor said, “and it was a lot of back and forth, it was a lot of sleepless nights with looking at my computer for hours. But at the end of the day, we created something beautiful.”
She said that process inspired them to think about how they could allow for students and teens to be more directly involved in creating this type of content.
“We were saying, ‘why are we the ones that are producing this content?” Eyigor said, “‘why are we not giving the tools and the resources and the support to the youth to create for youth, whether that was the written content or the video content?’”
Katie O’Rourke, a junior studying film and television in the College of Communication and a production and editing intern at GNG, said she joined the team to help edit these educational videos.
“The ideas for the videos came from the youth that were participating in the Content Creation Lab,” O’Rourke said. “They came up with the ideas for the videos, we help them brainstorm and work through them to then end up with a final product.”
O’Rourke said the GNG aims to produce educational content that isn’t “talked about in a classroom setting,” and provide their custom curriculums to schools and organizations, such as the Girl Scouts, with hopes of spotlighting youth voices.
As of now, O’Rourke noted their content is only accessible on the GNG curriculum.
Amanda Reiling, a former CCL human rights team leader and a recent international relations and affairs graduate from the University of Georgia, said the videos were aimed to be integrated with other mediums.
“We wanted to correlate the written content and the video content in a creative way,” Reiling said, “to where it’s engaging, it’s short but still informative to youth.”
She said the videos are created in different formats that allow for adolescents around the world to visually share certain aspects of their lives that reflect the learning goals of the GNG.
“We’ve had interview style, vlog style,” Reiling said. “The videos themselves are pretty short, I’d say most of them are under five minutes, if not all of them.”
Eyigor said she hoped the CCL encourages young people to learn and connect with their peers.
“My biggest goal for Content Creation Lab is to reach youth that are not able to travel, to have the experience, to have that fostering, nourishing experience,” Eyigor said, “to work in cross-national teams and learn to collaborate with different people from all over the world.”
