Google Analytics provides a ton of interesting data about our website (uci.open.edu) visitors. Some of it can be quite surprising! In this blog post, we’ll look at where our visitors come from, based on their IP addresses.
Which country is in the number one spot? There is no surprise here; it’s the United States with 19,608 sessions for December 2015. (A session is defined as the period of time during which a user is actively engaged with a website.) Who is number two? It’s India with 2,664 sessions (a very distant second!). After that we have two additional English-speaking countries, Canada and the United Kingdom, with 1,408 and 1,045 sessions, respectively. Next comes Egypt, Australia, and Pakistan. The top 15 are listed below:
(Data for December 2015 from Google Analytics accessed on 1/19/2016.)
As expected, English-speaking countries are near the top — after all, our courses are taught in English! The number two country, India, not only has English speakers but is very populous and places a high value on competing globally in science and technology. Hence, it’s not surprising that its citizens would seek educational resources.
One unexpected result on the list is Egypt, which is ahead of Australia. Despite the problems facing many people in the Middle East, interest in education (or at least interest in our website) appears to remain robust. Continuing down the list we have a mixture of developed and developing countries of different sizes. (Also, note that the number of views drops off very quickly even when ignoring the huge value from the United States. Egypt’s “views” value is indeed greater than that of Australia, but then as we look down the list below Egypt, we see that the numbers are much smaller than those of the top two or three countries.
If we wanted to try predicting the number of UCI Open website views, we might look at demographic and economic factors associated with each country, but most likely there are numerous other complex factors that come into play. For instance, such cultural elements as politics and access to education might significantly influence the number of UCI Open visits we see. Perhaps researchers who study global education trends might be persuaded to examine this in greater detail.