Being one of the largest online Java programming courses with over 0.5 mln registered users, we at CodeGym are dedicated to helping all our students to get the maximum benefit out of learning on our platform. And even though the CodeGym course was designed to be as engaging and fun as possible, mastering any programming language just can't be easy. It requires time and concentrated effort. Everyone knows that, but when it comes to specific figures, the answers are usually quite vague.
This is what we wanted to change with a new study of CodeGym students’ learning habits. How many hours a week an average user is studying? What is the percentage of time they spend on reading theory and solving practical tasks? When is the best time of the day to learn Java online? How long on average does it take to complete each level of the course? Our goal was to answer these and other questions about the amount of time and effort a typical user needs in order to learn a programming language online.
Naturally, we wanted to share the results of this study with our audience, as this information may help you to plan your own learning and see how realistic your study plan is based on the average numbers.
Java learning habits study
As you may or may not know, besides English, CodeGym is available to users looking to acquire Java coding skills in multiple other languages. The English version is the most popular by far, with almost 438,000 registered users. The second most popular is Polish version with 24,5k users, German version is the 3d with 16k users. There are also French (over 10k registered users), Chinese (7.3k) and Spanish (2.3k users) versions of CodeGym available online.
In this particular study, we were focused on our students from the EU, mainly Poland, Germany, and France as our three biggest markets in the EU. But we do believe that the findings of this research are largely universal and can be extrapolated to other locations across the globe.
Time
The total amount of time an average student spends every week on learning at CodeGym is 7-8 hours. As CodeGym is a practice-focused Java course, and we encourage all our students to practice as much as possible in order to learn Java faster, we also wanted to know how much time our students in different countries spend on solving CodeGym’s practical tasks.What we found was that students from France spend slightly more time than users from other countries on solving tasks at CodeGym — 2 hours and 57 minutes per week on average. Students from Poland came close second (2 hours and 50 minutes per week), while students from Germany practice considerably less — 2 hours and 26 minutes per week on average.
Another thing we wanted to find out as a result of this study is at what time of the day our students are learning on CodeGym. Unsurprisingly, most of them prefer to study during the daytime, with 12-1 pm being the busiest period. And these habits tend to stay the same for users from Poland, France, and Germany in an equal manner.
Learning pace
When it comes to learning pace or the time it takes an average student to complete the CodeGym course, this information was more difficult to extract out of the user data that we had as many users do not complete all the levels up to the very end of the course. It isn’t uncommon for many people to postpone learning for weeks or months to return to it later.
Time to finish First CodeGym Quest
This is why we focused our analysis on the average time it takes students to complete the Java Syntax. And the numbers were considerably different depending on the country. For students from Poland, it takes 2 months on average to finish the Java Syntax, while users from France and Germany need just one month to reach the end of it.
Time to finish one level
We also managed to calculate the average number of days it takes students to get through individual levels in the course. For users from Poland, it takes them 94 days on average to get from the start of the course to Level 22. For people from France and Germany, it takes the average of 83 days to get the same result. Interestingly enough, Levels from 6 to 9 seem to be the most difficult for many students to go through. These are parts of the course that cover the following topics: arrays and lists, objects, collections, and exceptions. So if you got stuck at one of those, at least you know you’re not alone.
Summary
By the end, let us share with you some of the conclusions that we made based on the results of this study and other recent data that we managed to gather thanks to our supportive community and CodeGym’s own analytical efforts.
Looking at the growth trends in the number of CodeGym users, in our opinion, it is safe to say that both the demand for Java development skills and the popularity of online education is on the rise. The global COVID-19 pandemic has been a major driver of the latter trend, as traditional education was hit hard by the lockdowns, and the consequences of that will be felt long-term for up to the next five years. According to this research by Guide2Research, we will see a decline in university applications worldwide by 15-25% in the next several years. The number of students taking various online learning courses, on the other hand, is growing steadily at around 5% every year.
The number of software developers is also on the rise: according to this data by Statista, currently there are around 24 mln software developers in the world, and by 2024 this number will increase to 28.7 mln. But even this won’t be enough to satisfy the market, increasingly hungry for talent, as analysts estimate that in 2022 the number of computer science-related jobs will grow by 37%, which means that the supply of employees in this field still won’t be able to meet the demand.
When it comes to Java, it remains to be the most popular programming language in the world according to the latest State of Developer Ecosystem report by JetBrains, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.
And we at CodeGym will continue to do everything possible to support our students across all countries and world regions in their willingness to learn Java and become professional software developers.
Expect more analytical reports and studies by us in the future!
This is what we wanted to change with a new study of CodeGym students’ learning habits. How many hours a week an average user is studying? What is the percentage of time they spend on reading theory and solving practical tasks? When is the best time of the day to learn Java online? How long on average does it take to complete each level of the course? Our goal was to answer these and other questions about the amount of time and effort a typical user needs in order to learn a programming language online.
Naturally, we wanted to share the results of this study with our audience, as this information may help you to plan your own learning and see how realistic your study plan is based on the average numbers.
What we found was that students from France spend slightly more time than users from other countries on solving tasks at CodeGym — 2 hours and 57 minutes per week on average. Students from Poland came close second (2 hours and 50 minutes per week), while students from Germany practice considerably less — 2 hours and 26 minutes per week on average.
Another thing we wanted to find out as a result of this study is at what time of the day our students are learning on CodeGym. Unsurprisingly, most of them prefer to study during the daytime, with 12-1 pm being the busiest period. And these habits tend to stay the same for users from Poland, France, and Germany in an equal manner.
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