Instructional videos have become a powerful tool for education and leadership, yet teachers are still evaluating these videos despite how easily they might produce them, how large the global need for knowledge is, and how disappointed students are when new media are not part of their instruction. This phenomenological study used the Tetrad of Media Effects, developed by McLuhan (McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988), to explore the learning values derived from instructional short videos through the lived experiences of 20 adult learners. Instructional videos enhance learning with visual content, where a nonlinear timeline is useful, improve the learning curve, allow just in time learning, and exploit student-to-self feedback. Instructional videos obsolesce teacher-to-student and student-to-teacher feedback, and reduce the student's tolerance for bad teachers. Instructional videos retrieve from the past the sense of a mentor surrogate using a virtual one-on-one interaction. When pressed to the extreme, instructional videos may reverse into total global knowledge reach and may promote celebrity instructors. However, these videos may exacerbate students' loneliness and isolation, and may degenerate into information entropy, confusion, and overload. The findings from this study constitute the beginning of a taxonomy comprising six themes: (a) enhancements for learners, (b) human interaction, (c) media comparisons, (d) feedback, (e) system of videos, and (f) pressed to the extreme. Organizational leaders should continue to exploit instructional videos, deliberately extend their use, and foster a system architecture to manage their growth. Scholars and leaders in the field should encourage experimentation seeking innovation. Despite the difficulty in establishing a governing theory, a quality metric system and an ethical vision need to be established for these videos.