Power-law decay of the view times of scientific courses on YouTube

The temporal power-law decay is one class of interesting decay processes, usually indicating a long-time correlation and benefiting for a system to perform functions in various time-scales. In this work, I collect the data of the view times versus lectures of some scientific courses on YouTube, according to some special principles. These data can reflect the dynamical property of the spontaneous learning behavior, influenced by the decay of learning interest. The view times versus lectures show an obviously power-law decay process. The power approximates to 1, a universal constant. This finding brings the learning process into the interesting power-law family. It will be of interest in the fields of the human dynamics, psychology and education. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.