Over the last decade, YouTube has become an influential site for mathematics learning across educational contexts. Research shows that students regularly use YouTube for exam preparation, revisiting difficult topics and self-paced study beyond classroom time (Seo et al.,2018; Ranga,2017; Tadbier&Shoufan,2021). Its accessibility, content archive, and visual affordances attract learners seeking flexible, autonomous engagement with mathematical ideas. Consequently, YouTube occupies an important—though unevenly structured—place in the international ecology of mathematics education.

This growing reliance has generated substantial research on learner interaction with mathematical content. Much of this work conceptualises YouTube through engagement, focusing on how users engage with videos. Drawing on Shao’s (2009) consumption, participation, production framework and multidimensional models of engagement (Hollebeek,2011; Khan,2017), studies examine viewing practices, user responses (e.g., likes and comments), and self-regulatory strategies such as rewatching. Within this literature, mathematics learning on YouTube is framed as a self-directed process aligned with learners’ goals, particularly in exam-oriented contexts (Cardoso et al.,2014; Klinger&Walter,2022).

A parallel strand of research examines those who produce educational content for YouTube. Creators are motivated by knowledge sharing, identity expression, and community building, alongside monetisation and professional branding (Maynard, 2021; Chun,2008; Burgess et al.,2020; Hoiles et al.,2017). This work highlights how YouTube fosters educational communities shaped by visibility and platform economics. However, creators are typically treated as a separate professional group rather than as participants in teacher education. Taken together, these bodies of literature leave a pedagogical gap: learners are conceptualised as consumers of mathematics instruction, while producers are treated as a distinct category of actors shaped by creativity, community and market forces. What remains missing is an account of what happens when future teachers are positioned within this environment—not as viewers, but as producers of mathematics teaching.

This gap matters because YouTube is not a neutral medium for delivering mathematical content. Research shows that platform logics—such as attention optimisation, visual appeal, and time constraints—influence which explanations gain visibility and how content circulates (Broxton&Khroustaleva,2012; Nurmalasari & Masitoh,2020). Mathematics often requires sustained reasoning, diagnosis of misconceptions, and careful conceptual development. When instruction is shaped by algorithmic visibility and compressed formats, teaching may be transformed in ways that teacher education has not yet theorised. This raises a question: How do teachers learn to teach in environments in which interaction is limited, feedback is delayed or absent, and understanding must be anticipated rather than negotiated in real time? Existing YouTube research, focused on engagement metrics and content features, cannot address this because it does not examine teaching as an epistemic and pedagogical practice within the platform.

To address this gap, we extend engagement theory by reinterpreting production not merely as uploading a video, but as pedagogical design under platform conditions. Building on Shao’s (2009) consumption–participation–production framework, we conceptualise the transition from YouTube consumer to YouTube producer as a shift in pedagogical positioning: from selecting existing explanations to designing explanations that must function within YouTube’s visual, temporal, and algorithmic constraints. This conceptual move allows us to treat YouTube as a platform-based pedagogical regime—a socio-technical environment that structures what counts as effective explanation, pacing, and representation. By situating preservice mathematics teachers within this regime through a production task, we examine how their understanding of teaching mathematics is reconfigured when designing for an unseen, self-directed, digitally mediated audience.

Against this theoretical backdrop, our study asks: 

How does the transition from YouTube consumer to YouTube producer reconfigure preservice mathematics teachers’ understanding of teaching mathematics? 

By analysing preservice teachers’ written reflections on producing YouTube-based mathematics lessons, the study offers a theoretically grounded account of how platform participation reshapes pedagogical reasoning. It bridges research on YouTube engagement, platform-based education and mathematics teacher education.

This study was designed as a qualitative, experience-based investigation of how preservice mathematics teachers make sense of teaching when they move from consuming to producing instructional content on YouTube. It was embedded within a third-year undergraduate course on media literacy for mathematics education in a Turkish teacher education program. The course aimed to develop critical and pedagogical awareness of digital media by engaging preservice teachers not only as users of online content but also as designers of instructional media. As part of the course, preservice teachers were introduced to different forms of mathematics teaching on YouTube and analysed Turkish-language mathematics channels in terms of pedagogical, representational, and communicative features. They then produced their own YouTube-style instructional videos (15–20 minutes) for public sharing. Each participant selected a mathematical topic, identified a target audience, developed a lesson plan, and created a complete instructional video designed to function within the norms and expectations of the platform. The goal was not technical proficiency but pedagogical engagement with the constraints and affordances of platform-based teaching. After completing the production task, participants responded in writing to a structured reflection form comprising twelve open-ended questions. These prompts explored their experiences of video production, challenges encountered, pedagogical insights gained, and shifts in how they viewed YouTube as a teaching and learning environment. In total, 77 preservice teachers submitted complete written reflections. For this paper, analysis focused on three prompts: (Q2) the most challenging aspects of producing a YouTube teaching video, (Q4) the contribution of this experience to their understanding of teaching, and (Q11) their evaluation of YouTube as a platform for mathematics instruction. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2019), which conceptualises themes as interpretive constructions developed through sustained engagement with participants’ meaning-making rather than fixed categories to be identified. Analysis proceeded in iterative stages. First, responses were read repeatedly to build familiarity and identify initial meaning units. Second, segments were coded inductively, attending to how participants described teaching, learning, and platform-related constraints. Third, codes were clustered into higher-order patterns capturing tensions in platform-based teaching (Q2), reconfigured understandings of pedagogy (Q4), and re-positioned evaluations of YouTube as a learning environment (Q11). Throughout the process, analytic memos supported reflexive interpretation and ensured coherence across the three question sets. This strategy enabled us to trace how producing YouTube mathematics instruction shaped preservice teachers’ conceptualisations of teaching and the role of digital platforms in mathematics education.

This study shows that engaging preservice mathematics teachers in YouTube production does not simply extend technical or digital skills; instead, it exposes them to a pedagogical regime that reconfigures how they understand teaching. Analysing reflections across three prompts—production challenges, contributions to their understanding of teaching, and evaluations of YouTube as a learning environment—reveals platform-driven pedagogical transformation. First, accounts of production difficulties highlight structural tensions in YouTube-based instruction. These include pressures to compress mathematical depth into short, attention-optimised formats, the absence of real-time student feedback, expectations of error-free performance, and the challenge of translating embodied classroom practices into visually mediated representations. Together, these tensions indicate that teaching for YouTube is not merely teaching “with technology,” but teaching under conditions shaped by algorithmic visibility, visuality, and performance norms. Second, these pressures reconfigured what teaching came to mean. Participants described moving away from interaction-based instruction toward a view of teaching as anticipatory design, content curation, multimodal orchestration, and empathic projection for an unseen learner. Teaching mathematics was no longer about responding to students in the moment, but about designing explanations that can function without immediate interaction or repair. Third, participants projected these understandings back onto YouTube itself. After producing videos, they no longer viewed YouTube only as a convenient resource. Instead, they positioned it as a space for self-paced rehearsal and visualisation of abstract concepts, while also describing it as dialogically weak and epistemically risky, where quality, feedback, and conceptual depth are unevenly supported. Overall, the transition from YouTube consumer to YouTube producer constitutes a pedagogical boundary crossing in teacher education. Experiencing the platform from the inside supported a more nuanced understanding of digital teaching and the limits of platform-based mathematics instruction. These findings underscore the value of production-based engagement with digital platforms in preparing future teachers for contemporary, platform-mediated learning.

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