Title: Investigating trends in learning programming using YouTube tutorials

Authors: Arbana Kadriu; Lejla Abazi-Bexheti; Hyrije Abazi-Alili; Veland Ramadani

Addresses: Faculty of Contemporary Sciences, South-East European University, Ilinden 335, 1200, Tetovo, Macedonia ' Faculty of Contemporary Sciences, South-East European University, Ilinden 335, 1200, Tetovo, Macedonia ' Faculty of Business and Economics, South-East European University, Ilinden 335, 1200, Tetovo, Macedonia; CERGE-EI, Prague, Czech Republic ' Faculty of Business and Economics, South-East European University, Ilinden 335, 1200, Tetovo, Macedonia

Abstract: The self-directed learning industry is gathering more and more pace nowadays. One of the most common ways in this learning model is YouTube tutorials, which provide worldwide easy access to knowledge. This paper investigates tutorial trends utilising their publicly available YouTube data. The research is limited to tutorials for 11 programming languages, but can be replicated to any other field of interest. This obtained data is analysed for different categories such as tutorials spreading through years, video statistics, localisation, language facts, and tags distribution for each programming language. Aiming to understand the changing path and trends in a certain programming language over time, we introduce two new metrics for this objective - increase ratio and weighted average for each programming language. It is found that the programming language Java is the most popular over the years, followed by PHP and Python. At the end of the popularity list are Perl, Swift and Objective-C. On the other side, the most contemporary programming language is Swift, followed by Python. The most outdated is Perl, followed by Objective C and C++.

Keywords: learning through YouTube; learning analytics; trends in learning; self-directed learning; programming languages.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLC.2020.106721

International Journal of Learning and Change, 2020 Vol.12 No.2, pp.190 - 208

Received: 23 Apr 2018
Accepted: 08 Oct 2018
Published online: 20 Apr 2020 *

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