Just over a year ago, on a pleasant Tuesday afternoon, a second year engineering student walked up to me after my sensor data analytics lecture. The student hesitantly asked me whether I would like to see a video of my lecture that he had recorded using his iPad. A little nervous about how I would look in my professorial avatar, I reluctantly agreed to watch the video expecting my face to be all over it. Alas, my nervousness was misplaced. I was noticeably missing all throughout the video! In fact, the iPad had been strategically placed to record the screen on which I was projecting my code. According to the student, the video helped him and his friends to work their way through the assignments for the class while ensuring that they actually programmed the code themselves. Right there, in that video, was my Aha moment, staring me blatantly in the face.
Immediately after the conversation, I came back to my research lab and emphatically brainstormed with my grad students, the possibility of our research group creating and posting videos online. The result was www.matlabarduino.org; a website dedicated to providing technically rigorous, free of cost, real-time sensor data analytics education. The website and the companion YouTube channel feature high-definition videos that demonstrate the use of MATLAB and Arduino platforms to interface with wired/wireless embedded systems for compelling sensor based real-time applications. The unifying theme for these videos is task of procuring, analyzing, and visualizing real-world data to generate real-time insights that facilitate data-driven decision making.
Immediately after the conversation, I came back to my research lab and emphatically brainstormed with my grad students, the possibility of our research group creating and posting videos online. The result was www.matlabarduino.org; a website dedicated to providing technically rigorous, free of cost, real-time sensor data analytics education. The website and the companion YouTube channel feature high-definition videos that demonstrate the use of MATLAB and Arduino platforms to interface with wired/wireless embedded systems for compelling sensor based real-time applications. The unifying theme for these videos is task of procuring, analyzing, and visualizing real-world data to generate real-time insights that facilitate data-driven decision making.
The videos have covered technologies that range from inertial sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers to ultrasonic and infrared distance sensors. Environmental sensors such as temperature and Force Sensitive Resistance (FSR) have been covered in great detail. Wireless technologies such as ZigBee (Xbee) and GSM (mobile phones) have been explicated. Other videos dive into the details of Geo-tagged (GPS) sensor data applications. Intuitive and coherent 2D and 3D visualizations of static and real-time data are presented to elucidate sensor measurement and computational concepts. Most recently, we have started producing videos that demonstrate enabling technologies such as the Raspberry Pi and Node.js for the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm.
The viewership has grown at an increasing rate since the beginning of the channel. The website has witnessed approximately 107,500+ views from over 160 countries to date. The United States accounts for almost 25% of the total viewership. Other top countries feature a healthy mix of countries from the Americas, Europe, and Asia. African nations form the lowest viewership for the YouTube channel; this is a cause of concern for us. The Chinese audience remains untapped since YouTube is not available in China at this moment.
From a viewer engagement perspective, a key challenge faced by online education is the average view duration for a video being shorter than the total length of the video. We face the same challenge with our videos and continue to find innovative solutions to address it.
The viewer feedback has been generally positive with most users thanking us on the YouTube channel for posting the videos. A significant number of messages request code for the videos. While all the code is displayed in the videos, as a matter of policy, these videos are meant to encourage the audience to create and further curate their own code repository. In the same vein, we encourage the viewers to write their own code. Should the viewers run into technical issues, we provide support to the extent possible. To date, the YouTube channel has witnessed 1600+ subscribers, an indication of growing viewer loyalty.
From a viewer engagement perspective, a key challenge faced by online education is the average view duration for a video being shorter than the total length of the video. We face the same challenge with our videos and continue to find innovative solutions to address it.
The viewer feedback has been generally positive with most users thanking us on the YouTube channel for posting the videos. A significant number of messages request code for the videos. While all the code is displayed in the videos, as a matter of policy, these videos are meant to encourage the audience to create and further curate their own code repository. In the same vein, we encourage the viewers to write their own code. Should the viewers run into technical issues, we provide support to the extent possible. To date, the YouTube channel has witnessed 1600+ subscribers, an indication of growing viewer loyalty.
A year later, we continue to remain true to our mission of providing our current and future generations of engineers and scientists the support structure and knowledge required to create systems that allow for effective and data-driven decision-making. Happy 1st birthday MatlabArduino.org!
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