Step By Step Analysis on the Educative Platform Data — Excel and Power BI
As a budding data analyst, I always wished to sit by a professional analyst while they worked on their projects. I needed this experience because I needed a formula for approaching my data analysis tasks. If you are new to the field of data analysis, this is my first complete data analysis project, ride with me!
In this blog, I will share my report on a data analysis project I worked on in Excel and Power BI. The data is from an online education company offering courses.
1. BACKGROUND
Educative is an education technology company that offers online courses in four subjects: Web Development, Business finance, Musical Instruments, and Graphic Design. The data has columns on the subjects, course titles, links to the courses, number of subscribers, lecturers, published dates, course price, course ratings, etc. As of 2017, the various subjects had the following number of individual courses:
The Head of Curriculum for Educative wishes to increase the prices of Web development courses since they are the most popular and she needs to know ways to increase earnings for the next quarter.
2. PROBLEM STATEMENT
After visualizing the data, there is a noticeable dip in the number of subscribers and total course prices from 2016 to date. Out of the four subjects, even though Web Development and Business Finance have a difference of 12 courses, there are far more subscribers for the former than the latter. The Graphic Design subject has 602 courses, which implies that they have relatively fewer subscribers; however, it recorded the highest reviews across all the levels.
If the company increases the prices of Web Development courses, would it affect the number of subscribers for the subsequent years? Since Graphic Design has the potential to increase revenue, would an increase in the number of lecturers and the number of courses affect the course subscribers?
This analysis presents recommendations on how the Educative company can increase revenue for the next quarter.
3. METHODOLOGY
3.1 Data Cleaning
The data provided by Educative Company was in separate files according to the four subjects. I imported the folder into Excel, and since they had the same columns, I appended the various sheets into a single table.
- For null values, some rows had no values recorded for specific columns, while other rows were completely empty. I deleted the empty rows, segmented the rows with empty column entries, and cleared them as well.
- The web development column had this format:
Subject: Web development
This subject title was extraneous, and so with the Excel find and replace tool, I replaced it with just Web development.
3. The published date column provided by the company had timestamps, so I created an entirely new column to hold just the dates since they were the most relevant measure for the analysis.
4. I went ahead and summarized the entire 3676 rows into a Pivot Table (in Excel) to facilitate the entire analysis.
3.2 Tools
The bulk of the analysis was done in Microsoft Excel, but since the CEO of Educative required a Power BI visualization, I replicated the work in Power BI.
4. FINDINGS
- The yearly subscribers for all the courses declined in 2016, after a major rise for all subjects in 2015. Business Finance, however, had a steady curve from 2012 to its fall in 2017. Graphic Design follows suit with a wavy performance, with its highest being in 2015.
2. The main difference between the course subscribers of Web Development and the bottom-performing subjects is the number of individual courses under them. Graphic Design and Musical Instruments have fewer subscribers compared to the top two because of the number of individual courses.
3. The average prices of the subjects reveal that the Web Development courses are far more expensive than all the other courses, especially the Intermediate level courses. Business Finance, Graphic Design, and Musical Instruments follow the Web Development courses in descending order of expense.
4. The course ratings, however, tell a very different story: Graphic Design courses have high ratings compared to the other courses, especially the expert-level courses. Business Finance courses follow after Graphic Design, before the popular Web Development courses, and then Musical Instruments courses.
5. A different pattern in pricing is seen across the years. In 2015 when the company recorded the highest number of subscribers, the subject prices shot up in 2016. 2016 from the visualizations above, recorded a decline in subscribers but the highest prices according to the visualization below. The prices however also fell massively in 2017.
6. The average duration of the courses on Educative has the highest at 5.59 hours for Web Development, followed by Graphic Design at 3.59 and Business Finance at 3.56, and ultimately musical instruments at 2.85 hours.
5. ANALYSIS
5.1 Pricing
For Web Development courses between 2011 and 2012, there were 119K subscribers against a $310 total course price. 2012–2013 saw a sharp increase in subscribers and a $10000 total price increase. Even though the number of subscribers stabilized in 2014, the sum of prices was up to $20,000. After the prices totaled 67.83K in 2015, the number of subscribers fell drastically from 2016 to 2017.
It is possible that at that peak, subscribers could no longer afford the courses hence the fall in the number of subscribers. But even after the prices were drastically reduced by a total of $30000, the number of subscribers still reduced.
Increasing the prices of Web Development courses would not increase the number of subscribers. The course ratings of the web development courses compared to the others suggests that they might generally be lacking in quality. The low ratings might be a reflection of how saturated the courses have become in that Web Development. An alternative approach would be increasing the quality of the courses instead of the quantity and the pricing.
Graphic Design
Since the Graphic Design courses have higher ratings, we can increase the pricing and the number of courses. Particularly for the Expert level since they had more ratings. Ratings are generally a reflection of customer satisfaction hence this observation.
Business Finance
The business finance courses have higher ratings than web development courses but averagely cost the same amount. However, the finance courses have 427K subscribers against 2173K total subscribers for web development courses. We could reduce the prices of business finance courses to gauge customer interactions in the next quarter.
5.2 Number of Lecturers
The highest total ratings are uniformly correlated with the highest number of lecturers across all subjects. The sum of ratings per subject increased positively with the number of lecturers across the years.
The Educative platform could invest in more lecturers for Graphic Design and Web Development courses.
6. CONCLUSION
1. Web Development courses are more popular than Business Finance courses. This is seen in the fact that even when their prices were the same, there were more web development subscribers. However, since 2016, the number of subscribers for both courses continues to decline; if the course prices increase, subscribers will further decrease. The company could invest in advertisement and marketing strategies to get more subscribers. Thus increasing revenue with Web development courses.
2. Resources could be diverted to growing the Graphic design courses because even though they have the least number, they have the highest ratings. Higher ratings imply positive customer satisfaction, so an increase in pricing and the number of courses may generate more revenue.
3. Business Finance courses should also be reviewed. There are more paid business courses than there are for web development. Yet the staggering difference between their total prices throughout the years. Generally, people taking Business Finance courses online might require certifications to land job roles, so paying for the courses solely might not be a worthy consumer investment.
Course prices for business finance can be reduced. Other sources of finances could be explored on the website, like running advertisements.
Notice the context in which I used the dashboard and report. Do you know the difference between the two?
Resources:
- Find the files and report on my GitHub here.
- Unless otherwise stated, all the visualizations were created in Excel.
