A Learning Science-based Analysis of “I Learned X in Y Days” YouTube Videos
by Jessica Masciovecchio and Xinhui Xu
Foundations of Learning Sciences, Fall 2024
🌠 Check out our presentation for a quick overview.
On November 23, 2023, PewDiePie, a popular YouTube content creator who once held the record of having the most subscribers on the platform, published a video titled “Teaching myself to draw for no reason.”, where he flips through his sketchbook and comments on what he drew and learned as a total beginner for the past 30 days.
PewDiePie subsequently published “I Drew Every Day for 100 DAYS!” and “I Drew Every Day for 365 Days….. *it was painful”* in a similar format*.* As of November 2024, the three videos grossed over 14 million views.
Fig 1. A screenshot of PewDiePie’s video thumbnail.
This type of videos, where an individual tries to take on a new skill and document every step of their journey, have become an entire genre on YouTube in recent years. Titles like “1 Year of Learning Web Development (Self Taught)” or “My One-Year Guitar Progress” are just a few examples that attract millions of views.
Clearly, this genre of videos is resonating with people. Now, the question is: is it an effective way to learn? What can learning designers, researchers, and learners learn from these videos?
To connect the theory we learned in our Learning Science course to practice, we (Jess and Xinhui) set out to search for a site where we can observe and analyze some type of learning in the wild. We landed on the online video-sharing platform YouTube for our virtual observation site, and we focus on videos with titles like “I learned XYZ in XYZ days,” which we will call YouTube learning journeys (YLJs)…