Question: what do YouTube analytics and ELT have in common?
Answer: more than you think.
Yesterday, I was watching a live stream replay of a YouTube channel I subscribe to.
It was a big day in sports here in Canada and the channel was buzzing.
As I’m writing this, the channel has 798K subscribers.
Watching the replay myself, the speakers kept saying - due to the day’s action - that they had the most people watching the stream live they’d ever had.
That number: 2500.
That’s about 3% of their total subscriber base. 24 hours later, the video had 22,000 views.
Almost 10x the amount of people watched it after the fact than live.
What does that mean?
I like to believe I’m a pretty observant person and I always try to make connections to my own life.
The question this left me pondering was: what does that percentage mean for us in ELT?
For education overall?
For how the future of online education will look?
I have no idea if a 3% live watch is an above, below, or exactly average number across all channels. But to hear them say that was their largest number ever gave me pause.
The main reflection for me is this: are we as a world moving away from experiencing things as they happen?
- social media is popular because we can consume it on our time
- Netflix is popular because we don’t have to be in front of the tv at 7PM on a Wednesday
- voice notes replace phone calls so we don’t actually have to be inconvenienced talking to another person
I do believe this applies to education, too.
We don’t work with students. We work with people. And people display human behaviours.
It may not be today, but I do believe that the vast majority of education will move to the non-live model.
Not because it’s a better learning experience. But because humans already behave that way.
And in a time of short attention spans, busy schedules, and people not even wanting to commit to watch a stream live, it’s only a matter of time.
Tik Tok.
The most popular question we get when we run a webinar?
Not about the topic or how it applies to their context or even if there will be a Q&A.
But this: will it be recorded?
If your teaching business model relies solely on students showing up to meet you on a specific day at a specific time, you may want to start pivoting.
Not because you want to. But because you need to.