Code Emporium

It’s amazing to see the kind of educational resources that are starting to crop up for free online. If you look on YouTube today, you’ll find channels from some of the top universities in the states like Stanford and MIT that feature entire lecture series taken from some of the courses taught there. About a month ago I was browsing through some of these series and noticed a kind of quaint pattern in how the number of views a lecture had received related to how far it was into the lecture series. I’m using this post as an excuse to get acquainted with R and so created some graphs to plot the number of views of five prominent lecture series available on YouTube:

Notice how the number of views drops radically between the first lecture and the second lecture in each series. The number of views continues to fall for a few more lectures, but at a much slower rate. I had to lol at the déjà vu when thinking back to some of the classes I took at university, where lecture attendance seemed to follow a somewhat similar pattern.

There’s way too little information in this data to draw any meaningfully accurate conclusions, but in true Today Tonight style, let’s try and do so anyway. Here’s some conjecture about what the data could mean:

People can’t be bothered learning stuff in any depth
Could the large drop off after the first video in a series be an indication that few people can muster up the will power to learn more than a lectures worth of information on any topic without losing motivation and moving onto something else? This conclusion would fit in nicely with proponents of the “kid’s these days don’t know anything/can’t stick with anything” school of thought. I’d put it as plausible, but I wouldn’t necessarily argue that people not bothering to watch a whole lecture series is a bad thing, depending on the circumstances.

Most people find the lecture videos boring
People watch the first video, only to find that it’s about as fun as watching paint dry. If the videos were truly boring though, you’d think that people would close them in the first few minutes, rather than subjecting themselves to 45 minutes or more of torture. It looks as though YouTube standards require a video to be watched in full for it to count as a view. If this holds true, then you can rule out the possibility of a whole load of people who watch only the first few minutes being registered as a view. Therefore all those who were counted as a “view” didn’t find it boring enough to end the video prematurely.

Although all the lecture series show a rapid decline in number of views after the first lecture, some have a decline more rapid than others. The following summarises the percentage drop in views between the first lecture and second lecture of each series.

This information could perhaps be a reflection of how “accessible” each individual course is, with a greater relative drop in views indicating that a course is harder to follow along with (hence people stop watching after the first lecture). I haven’t watched either the Linear Dynamical Systems or Introduction to Robotics series which are at the two extremes of the data, so I can’t provide any opinion on one being any more accessible than the other. Still, it would be interested to know if the hypothesis had any merit to it.

Anyway, this analysis is hardly scientific and the statistics should be filed under descriptive at best. Still, it’s interesting to see how the different lecture series follow a similar viewing pattern.