Using Data to Analyze Online Learning -Udemy Web Scraping
Introduction:
Udemy is an online learning platform for students and professionals. Udemy has more than 50 million students and 57,000 instructors who teach courses in over 65 languages. The company has more than 100,000 online courses available on desktops, laptops and mobile devices through its Android and iOS apps. Users can study any topic at any time, and every course purchase includes lifetime access to the classes. In this text we will use data to analyze online learning -udemy web scraping.
Popular course categories on Udemy include:
- Development
- Business
- IT and software
- Design
- Marketing
- Personal development
- Photography
- Music
You can answer a few quick questions, including what topics you’re curious about and how familiar you are with specific subjects, to receive personalized course recommendations.
Udemy courses are taught by video, audio or text. Course features vary by platform but can include quizzes, closed captions, bookmarks, reviews and instructor announcements.
When you complete a paid Udemy course, you receive a certificate of completion.
Some popular online learning platforms feature a membership system, but Udemy is a pay-per-course service. Courses on Udemy range from $9 to $300, and the company frequently hosts sales.
Motivation:
Udemy is already a great online platform for remote learning, and it has become much more popular and handier during this COVID-19 pandemic. As lot of people working from home or out of work enrolled in lot of courses to enhance their skills or learn new technologies for further career advancements. Being a student for more than 5 years and learned great courses for reasonable price, I was curious to see what the trending courses/ certifications during this time are.
Data extraction:
I have used Scrapy and Selenium for scraping udemy.com as this site is java script rendered. Scraped 45000 records from different categories and different features such as No of students, rating, start, which category, if it is a best seller etc.
Data pre-processing:
Some data clean-up has been done to split the Category into 3 different columns to put it to the better use.
Exploratory Data Analysis:
Primary analysis reveals that majority courses have 4.4-to-4.7-star ratings. There are 500k courses rated below 4.2 stars.
Our general intuition is that we look at the number of ratings before we sign-up for a course to get an idea of the quality of the content. We have a ratings feature extracted and the plot below shows that the courses with 4-5 stars has ratings between 25k-50k. There are some courses very highly rated as above 100k.
We have two more features lecture hours and if the course is a best seller or not. We would like to find out if the lecture hours have any impact on a course being a best seller. The plot below proves that the average lecture hours for a best seller is 8, whereas for the non-best seller is 4.5. It could be that students give good ratings to the elaborated courses than the abstract ones. Because individuals like to sign up for the collection of courses than going for the individual ones. This also shows that, for those who would like to offer the courses, and for it to be a best seller, the course needs to be at least 8-hour lectures.
Below are the top 10 course categories with high number of students enrolled. Development and IT are leading in the current market trend.
Same results were plotted using log scale.
Below are the top 10 courses in which field within the development with high number of students enrolled. Web Development, programming languages and certification courses look very popular.
Same results were plotted using log scale.
Python is the popular programming language that has high demand in the market. Ethical Hacking and JavaScript has the 2nd popular courses and both has almost same number of students. Java and AWS certification are 3rd in the row with similar demand.
Same results were plotted using log scale.
Below plot shows that Python and AWS Certification has highest rated languages so far in Udemy.
Python and JavaScript are the languages with the highest stars.
Below box plot shows that the best sellers are highest star rated courses as well. From this it is evident that for a course to be a best seller, ratings, stars and no of students playing a vital role.
Conclusion:
Most rated courses, highly subscribed courses and best star rated courses are mostly from software and technology. Marketing also looks demanding, and people are also interested in finance and accounting to a certain extent. Based on interests or background, one can decide on which course can be the best fit for career growth.
Github link: https://github.com/Swathi3255/Udemy
The skills I demoed here can be learned through taking Data Science with Machine Learning bootcamp with NYC Data Science Academy.
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