Watch Higher Ed Online Marketing Videos Evolve From 2006 to Today

It's hard to imagine today, but there was a time on the Internet when an online video was a luxury many sites couldn't afford to produce, let alone host.

In 2005, YouTube helped solve one aspect of that dilemma by centralizing online videos for the vast majority of Internet users. As a result, the site now serves as a kind of time machine to explore videos posted across the past decade.

So what's in YouTube’s past for higher education? That's the subject of a new post by Karine Joly on collegewebeditor.com, a higher education Web, marketing and public relations blog.

Not everyone jumped on the online video bandwagon right away, Joly writes. There were practical barriers to entry, apart from not everyone wrapping their brains around the idea of online video marketing.

"Production costs were high, staff expertise in the domain was rare and bandwidth use was billed as any other scarce commodity," she writes.

Joly selected 10 videos from across the past decade of higher education as milestones for the medium. Here are three:

University of Florida — The Undergraduate (2006)

Johns Hopkins University — We Thank You Video (2009)

Beloit College — Squirrels Speak (2010)