Statistical Profiles of Users’ Interactions with Videos in Large Repositories: Mining of Khan Academy Repository

Abstract

The rapid growth of instructional videos repositories and their widespread use as a tool to support education have raised the need of studies to assess the quality of those educational resources and their impact on the quality of learning process that depends on them. Khan Academy (KA) repository is one of the prominent educational videos’ repositories. It is famous and widely used by different types of learners, students and teachers. To better understand its characteristics and the impact of such repositories on education, we gathered a huge amount of KA data using its API and different web scraping techniques, then we analyzed them. This paper reports the first quantitative and descriptive analysis of Khan Academy repository (KA repository) of open video lessons. First, we described the structure of repository. Then, we demonstrated some analyses highlighting content-based growth and evolution. Those descriptive analyses spotted the main important findings in KA repository. Finally, we focused on users’ interactions with video lessons. Those interactions consisted of questions and answers posted on videos. We developed interaction profiles for those videos based on the number of users’ interactions. We conducted regression analysis and statistical tests to mine the relation between those profiles and some quality related proposed metrics. The results of analysis showed that all interaction profiles are highly affected by video length and reuse rate in different subjects. We believe that our study demonstrated in this paper provides valuable information in understanding the logic and the learning mechanism inside learning repositories, which can have major impacts on the education field in general, and particularly on the informal learning process and the instructional design process. This study can be considered as one of the first quantitative studies to shed the light on Khan Academy as an open educational resources (OER) repository. The results presented in this paper are crucial in understanding KA videos repository, its characteristics and its impact on education.