We just want say ‘Happy 3rd MilleniDay’, or should that be ‘3rd KiloDay’ to our sister project, Clinisnips. That is, it is 3001 days since the first video went live on the Clinisnips channel on April 16th, 2008.

In that time, there have been nearly 4.7M views of the channel, at a rate of about 100 views per hour, which has not dropped off at all since the channel was launched.

Google Analytics is a very powerful tool and we have pulled some impressive stats over that time period. We calculate that the Watch Time over that period is over 7.68 million minutes or more than 127,000 hours of CME!

Now, of course, as we recognized back in our article…

Topps, D., Helmer, J., & Ellaway, R. (2013). YouTube as a platform for publishing clinical skills training videos. Academic Medicine : Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, 88(2), 192-7. doi:10.1097/ACM.0b013e31827c5352

… not every viewer will be a healthcare professional. While we are happy that the reach of Clinisnips has been very broad, as demonstrated by the broad variety of Comments that we found in our qualitative analysis, we have not been able to track in detail who has been watching Clinisnips and what else they do around those times.

You can be sure, however, that Google has a very good idea of what its users do on all of its sites, services and channels. It is why they have grown to be the size they are today. This is big data, writ large. While they share little snippets of analytics with their contributors like us, they spend a lot of effort in tracking the activity metrics of all of us.

This is why we are becoming increasingly excited about what can be done with big data, and activity metrics (via xAPI etc) in the education research world. Imagine how much more effective we could make our educational materials, if we understood how they are used and what impact they have. We are late to the table, compared to commerce. It is well past time that we started looking at what our users do, not what they (or their teachers) say they do!