Just over a year ago I mentioned that I was using the video series Ethics Matters with a couple of my paying young-teen students (both teens separately, as one-to-one students). We finished it a few months ago.
It is an excellent series and it was well worth the time spent on it. There are 12 12-minute videos in the series. It took us about 24 one-hour lessons to go through it all. We'd stop and start the videos, discussing the content as we went.
With one of the students (who prefers to learn through videos rather than books) I have now started working through Crash Course Philosophy, which is 46 10-ish-minute videos. After 12 lessons we are now partway through #12 in the series.
From what I see of the series so far, it is like someone has looked at the standard first-year university philosophy courses (metaphysics/epistemology, ethics, logic) and grabbed the topics covered. Each episode then summarises in ten minutes what might have been an hour-long lecture plus readings.
Honestly, Crash Course Philosophy is not nearly as good as Ethics Matters. In general I really like Crash Course (I've written about it before here), and while their philosophy series is not bad, it doesn't have quite the same sharpness that Ethics Matters has. The presenter, Hank Green, is very smart and well-read, but it is clear that he has not had much philosophical training and his logical reasoning is sometimes not quite so spot on. He misses things and blurs things every once in a while. It really is a shame that they didn't get a trained philosopher in to head the series.
I plan to continue with Crash Course Philosophy with this student, and I recommend it as a nice introduction/advertisement for philosophy, but, yeah, Ethics Matters is still my favourite teen-level online teaching video series.
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