YouTube announces today (on the same day we welcome our new Vice Chancellor) that 45 university YouTube channels from six countries in Europe (France, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, United Kingdom) and Israel, will now be accessible through YouTube EDU, a portal for university content on YouTube. The portal launched for US universities in March. The European launch brings new functionality – users can now select videos by subject and language.
The Open University’s YouTube channel is the largest and most popular of the UK university channels – our 633 videos have been viewed over 1.6 million times and we have 2600 subscribers. In September, 77% of views came from outside the UK with most views coming from the US.
John Naughton, Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at The Open University, was good enough to comment while dashing round the country: “As we move from a media ecosystem dominated by broadcast television into one dominated by ‘pull’ media like the Web, universities have to be where the action – and the demand – is. Given that The Open University has multimedia in its institutional DNA, YouTube EDU is an obvious platform for us and it’s good to see that a significant number of our European partners have come to the same conclusion.”
YouTube staff have developed the portal in the 20% time they are allowed to dedicate to special projects. Anna De Paula Hanika, product marketing for YouTube in EMEA is one of the key people dedicating time to this along with Jack Sheldon. In their PR Anna says what YouTube EDU means to her: “YouTube EDU is a global classroom where everyone – from those who want to see what university courses are like, to intellectually curious graduates – can watch and engage with a range of academic videos that have been uploaded by some of the world’s most prestigious universities. Our education destination is a direct response to our community’s interest in this type of content and we look forward to adding even more institutions over time.”
The Open University launched four official channels on YouTube in August 2008 – OUView for videos about the University, OULearn for learning materials from OU courses and BBC broadcasts, OULife for student and staff events and OUResearch.
The channels aren’t just about OU video content but give us the opportunity to engage people in conversation about the content and encourage viewers to submit their own videos. Recently viewers of the BBC/OU Saving Britain’s Past series have posted videos describing what they consider as their heritage
An odd title for a blog that promotes free access to content but the issue of sustainability is ever more urgent. For years people have been trying to work out how to make money off the back of free access to digital content and services. A global credit crunch may be a good time to admit defeat and say if we haven’t found a solution yet, we probably won’t in the next five years. Obituaries are being written for the death of the freemium model, no longer to be bank rolled by rich VC’s. But it’s hardly a good time to tell the consumer that you’re going to start charging for things you’ve previously given away for free. They might nod in sympathy but they won’t pay. We could all rely on getting a cut of advertising monies that are going largely to online (scaring the hell out of TV and print people) but doesn’t most ad budget online go to Google? The rest of us might get enough so the bailiff can have milk in his tea when he calls.
Working business models seem to be few and far between or secrets of success not to be shared. In a recent conference I attended a panel session on monetising media. One of the speakers later asked me what I thought. I had to admit I’d heard nothing new. He thought for a second and replied that, yes, indeed he should have shared some examples about what worked because there were plenty out there. Then he exited left.
So it’s good to see that in these times of financial crisis there is still support for innovation. The current climate will certainly provide the necessary focus.
The Technology Strategy Board currently has £5 million to give to UK based companies and research organisations to develop applications or tools which help rights holders commercially exploit digital content. Expressions of interest need to be in one month from now on the 23rd April so if you are interested check out Accessing and Commercialising Content in a Digitally Networked World.
The Technology Strategy Board are interested in:
Development of new business models, business processes, consumer experiences and approaches to deriving commercial benefit from IP.
Applications that make it easier for rights holders to efficiently and effectively collect revenue from their content/services.
Solutions to broaden the market access of digital content services; this could include the development of new platforms designed to deliver scale to small businesses, or solutions to support multiplatform distribution of content based services.
Applications to help provide intelligent access to context relevant content, e.g. driven by individual consumer behaviours, habits, preferences or device selection.
Development of intuitive tools and applications to increase participation and extend democratisation of the Web for generating and interacting with content and networks.
Applications or tools to support the emergence of new value chains.
An interesting starting point would be the Guardian newspaper’s Open Platform which enables commercial applications to be built on their Content API and their Data Store. I love this column by Emily Bell from 2006, where she talks about how originators and aggregators need to provide value for each other. Certainly the Guardian should attract more advertising revenue if its content and data is as valuable to third parties as they suspect it will be. So is everyone a winner? Everyone with stacks of good content and data and a current advertising model perhaps.
MIT I love you. I do. But it’s not fair that you are allowed the logo YouTomb for your fab Free Culture project that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for copyright infringement. We wanted to brand our Open University YouTube channel OUTube but Google asked us politely not to.
Whenever something big happens online at the moment Stephen Fry is behind it. We put up a video on YouTube illustrating The Thatcher Effect (a psychology experiment) 5 months ago. It got about 18,000 views. Then 3 days ago it suddenly got 5 months worth of traffic in one day because Boing Boing embedded it in their blog. I thought this had something to do with the fact Cory Doctorow was visiting the university the following day and had been looking at what we were doing to put content out there. But it seems another Boing Boing writer, Mark Frauenfelder, had picked it up from the forgetomori blog.
When I contacted Peter Thompson at York University who is reponsible for The Thatcher Effect experiments to let him know of the interest, he told me the experiment had got a mention on QI a few weeks ago. Indeed there is now a debate among viewers of the YouTube video, whether QI was inspired by the OU or vice versa (and also a debate about whether the man in the clip is Chris Tarrant with long hair – this one I can clear up, we couldn’t afford Chris Tarrant). “OU inspires Stephen Fry” would be a lovely headline.
In another small world coincidence, I happened to be at an event with a researcher from QI on the day it went viral. But I didn’t even buy him a drink so no bribes were involved. I promise.
Since then YouTube must have recognised the spike in traffic and featured the video on their homepage and in their promoted video stream. The Best of YouTube blog have featured it and want to use it in their podcast which has 500,000 subscribers. Overnight we received over 400 comments and views rose to over 137,000. Our OULearn channel is the 36th most viewed today in the Directors category – just 850 views below Channel 4’s YouTube site which has twice as many videos and mass media audience and content.
The lessons are we need a rapid response team to deal with the amount of interest a viral video can create and we need to think about whether The Open University got benefit. YouTube doesn’t drive much traffic to our site because links out are quite hidden – but if it did, would we cope with it? Would we be sending people to something interesting? (In this case our link on YouTube sends people to an explanation of the experiment). Did people learn from the video? Did people credit the OU and have a positive response? Did we make the most of the opportunity to spread the word about our YouTube channel through a viral video (most people’s attention drops at the end of the video, as in films, when the credits start rolling). Also, while we do have rules around how we moderate comments, the impact of having a huge number of comments makes you question the rules you’ve created. This has also confirmed that the content we made for YouTube (rather than the video we’ve simply repurposed from course content) does have the viral factor.
So thank you Stephen, thank you the OU. I accept this Oscar… I’m too emotional to go on. I’ll leave it to the film to speak for me.
One of the reasons we started putting up Open University videos on YouTube a few years ago was because we had launched OpenLearn and had a number of videos available under a CC license. However finding the videos on OpenLearn wasn’t easy as we had no search facility for videos. We also didn’t provide a player or an embed option to allow people to more easily share the videos. So we hosted them on YouTube where all that functionality was available. A jolly Web 2.0 approach to things.
Last week YouTube announced that they are beta testing a download function with a number of US partners who want to provide their videos under a CC license (Stanford, Duke, UC Berkeley, UCLA and UCTV). They are also testing an option that will allow video owners to charge for downloads using Google Checkout although they don’t say if they’ll be taking a cut.
This will hopefully raise awareness and understanding of CC licensing and allow those producers who support it to be able to more clearly mark-up their videos. Greg M Johnson made a comment on the CC blog that reminded me of some of the conversations we’ve had about YouTube Terms and Conditions and the “culture of embed”. If you can embed a video, enabling reuse (and any producer can turn this functionality off), then is it essentially the same as using a cc-by-nd license?
Flickr has had a CC search for ages and it’ll be nice to see this on YouTube. It’ll also be useful for some people to be able to download video and use it offline. It’ll be useful for us as we have a job to do to make a distinction between our videos on YouTube – some of which are CC licensed and some of which are all rights reserved. So I’ll watch with interest and wait to see if it gets rolled out to UK partners.
TogetherLearn is in beta and while I haven’t got through the door it is looking interesting from the doormat. A “turn-key platform where knowledge workers can collaborate” it’s all about self service learning. Other buzz words include open, participative, bottom-up, networked, flexible, and responsive. This is the brainchild of some pretty brainy people – Jay Cross, the man who coined the term ‘elearning’ and thinks blended learning is bull****, Jane Hart, social media and learning consultant, Clark Quinn, a cognitive design expert and Harold Jarche a consultant in Enterprise 2.0.
Jay advocates informal learning as the most effective form of learning and knowledge sharing. In a recent article ‘Informal learning is the future‘ he explains why they are charging for TogetherLearn – a radical concept in a world of free services and freemium business models.
“We had thought about giving this away but this means that business wouldn’t take it seriously. We spend three days with the user of this service to make sure it is properly supported with community champions and make sure it is kept alive. That is vital to make online learning communities work well.”
The mention of community champions suggests that providing support is critical to a ‘bottom-up’ informal learning platform, yet this isn’t the traditional support provided by tutors in an educational system. Jay says the role of the teacher is changing and the days of the ’sage on the stage’ are numbered. This is something that people working in Open Educational Resources have been musing on for some time, with The Open University’s Giselle Ferreira talking at Online Educa Berlin last week on Who Needs Teachers Anyway?. How is a world of free quality educational content and tools changing the role of the teacher?
Universities are increasingly opening up access to their course materials, but consider their teaching staff part of the premium service that paying ‘customers’ get access to. If access to education is going to become truely democratic and transformative, do technologies need to replicate the sense making and motivation a teacher provides to their students? Can they? (I’m thinking of an app that can replicate my favourite history teacher standing on a chair playing the role of Cromwell while a Blackadder video plays in the background).
Can communities provide volunteer mentors? Who is the mentor, the coach, the trainer, the teacher and the tutor? (I feel a joke or a Christmas carol coming on… three tutors marking, four forums facilitated, five gold stars).
There are numerous websites out there that are reliant on the tutor-student relationship. P2P University is about to launch in order to fill some of the support gaps that exist in use of Open Educational Resources, with some interesting approaches to payment and mentors. Beanbag Learning helps parents find tutors for their children. School of Everything is opening minds to the idea we all have something to teach and something to learn, a nod to the shift in hierarchy between student and teacher that is happening in a technology enabled world.
If it is generally accepted that tutors have a role, but that role is changing, what does it look like? In the future will we select teachers by their Teacherati rating? What skills will a teacher need to rise to the top of the search engines? Will learners best construct courses from a variety of freely available content and tools? Will our degrees be granted by an individual expert, cutting out the university as a middleman institution? And what can we learn from teacherpreneurs?
Ummm… maybe the answer is out there in a community forum? Or do I need an expert?
At last week’s Web 2.0 Expo I went to see Dion Hinchcliffe talk about Building successful next generation Web 2.0 applications.
Here are the most pertinent points for the OU as it considers building SocialLearn.
Design is what makes the difference between a leading and an average site. Growth is only limited by design of your application. 95% of sites have to drive traffic constantly, and when the product stops being promoted it stops growing. YouTube and FaceBook both grew to lead positions within 18 months without any major promotion.
The success is down to the user providing the value and having control and the site responding quicker than the competitor to the needs of the user. One example is XM radio who gave control of the station to their listeners – what would happen if the OU gave control to the students? Can these models apply to education? Is a course list like a playlist? What is the equivalent of a DJ shout out in a university? Other examples include Amazon’s mturk.com – a marketplace for work, where the worker selects a task and works when they want to, or castingwords.com transcription services. People are embedded in product, people are what make the product.
If we accept that the user creates the value in Web 2.0, it follows that your user differentiates your product from any other. If good features get quickly and easily copied (like status updates) your USP may be in your users and how well you respond to their needs. How can students enrich what a university offers? How can we respond better to students needs? Can we get over the idea that we (the institution/teacher) always know best? Users of a product often know the product better than the people who work for the company who make it, and will use it in unexpected ways. In education a teacher will be intimately connected with the ‘product’ (course) but will not experience it in the same way their students will.
Dion said that competitive advantage is in having the best data and releasing new features/ capability every few days, continually responding to the market place quicker than your competitors. We have to see SocialLearn as a product with customers, rather than an OU supported project if we’re to work in the ways necessary to succeed.
The value in collective intelligence is in user contributions, building up a database of intentions (searches, clicks, tags, recommendations), sharing that data to improve user experience (prior similar uses, accumulated experience), and creating viral feedback loops.
An architecture of participation fundamentally underpins Web 2.0 sites like digg. If the value is in user contributions and 1-10% of users contribute, how many users do you need to create a valuable site? Are you paying lip service to Web 2.0 if your site could exist without your users? There is a danger in designing a site that says we are the best because of what we know, rather than saying we are the best because we facilitate our users to know what they want to know better. Transparency is essential to showing everyone who did what and the more you know about the user the more you can place a personal, educational or commercial value on that person’s action. I’d like to see SocialLearn help identify the ‘connectors’ in educational networks that enable information flow between niche subject communities.
It’s all about intentions, gestures, personal data, shared data, and a secret formula!
Thinking about the data set that best captures educational experiences is vital to the success of any project like SocialLearn. If potent datasets are behind all leading sites and the value is in information, what data can we capture from learning and feedback to users to help them learn more efficiently? The race is on to own the major classes of data online and given that use adds the value, access to that data will be free. This means that people will only use the best set of data online. They have no reason to use second best. Social bookmarking is still a class without a strong owner, as is identity, public calendaring of events, and parental control data. Search will act as a lens on user data. Can SociaLearn act as a lens on learning data?
And how can it utilise other API’s that give access to data. Comparing data sources can be really useful for students. One example is Flash earth – the user chooses to view the same map from different perspectives by choosing data from various map data providers. Destinations sites are going to fail, and revenue comes from API use. 90% of Twitter use comes via the API. Amazon have 55,000 partners using their ecommerce API’s live. They turned a web service into a platform and 300K businesses build on top of what they’ve produced. Examples include simple storage service (s3) and elastic compute cloud.
Other value comes from SDK’s. What is the OU version of a Google web toolkit?
Some sound advice from Dion included:
Think about cost effective scalability – 24/365 operations
Maintain control over unique hard-to-recreate information that gets richer the more people use it
Trust users as co creators
Harness collective intelligence
Go for lightweight business models – customer self service, long tail, turn apps into platforms, encourage unintended uses
Either meter use of your api like electricity meter or give it away for free if use will contribute to your sales.
You need skills in assembly over development – mashup’s seamlessly bring content from several places into one place making innovation in assembly more important than ingenuity in coding.
He also covered some of the issues involved in choosing to use 3rd party services. Figure out what we do better than anyone else, focus on that and use 3rd party services for anything else.
Andraz Tori from Zemanta gave a talk at the Web 2.0 Expo about making it easier for people to create content, which made my ears perk up. Regular readers of this blog will know I’ve spent some time moaning about the interface we provide academics with to remix Open University course content in OpenLearn. So anything that can provide a nicer content creation environment is of interest – not just technically but in a way that appeals to the motivations of authors. Andraz said GUI is 80% – make creation of content easy.
Zemanta describes itself as a smart blog – as you write your blog posts it understands what you are writing about and offers you related links, photos and tags. This leads to opportunities for direct monetization (through affliate links), a better service for the author, ability to skip search and save time, and possibly more page views through trackbacks. The author’s noncreative workload is reduced, potentially motivating them to write more regularly and allowing them to concentrate on crafting their content. It also steers the author towards others discussing the same subject, helping them to become part of a community. The reblog feature (clipping other people’s blog posts to insert them inside your own) and efficient use of metadata leads to more chances for distribution and repurposing. Recommended interlinks to content found elsewhere of our own websites can also help with SEO. Real time updates on who else is writing about your subject while you write a post is great for staying topical and on top of commentary in any debate and can be filtered to include the key influencers in your field of interest. (I fear I would get easily distracted.)
The author can act as a filter for recommended content and metadata by compiling whitelists and blacklists. The system understands previous behavior and the data being dealt with to make random recommendations.
Some bloggers see 10-15% traffic increase from smart blogging.
Andraz gave some non-Zemanta examples and talked a little about “the next web” where computers will understand content and social context better. What if your computer understood what you were writing about, knew who you know and suggested content your community likes, for you to reference. What would your text editor look like? He quoted Marta Strickland on the idea that the next web is like a great party host, introducing people for meaningful conversation.
This raises interesting questions for remixing educational content intelligently and easily. If something like Zemanta could be used to guide you, making your remix better, easier, more enjoyable, more satisfactory and quicker to produce would more academics remix educational content? We already have some simple tools like the OER recommender that suggests links to related OER content.
I wonder also if this has implications for research – making it easier to reference the work of other academics? What about plagarism? And will smart blogging create more personalised content or limit differentiation between authors writing in an echo chamber of key influencers? Will it change who is listened to and written about but still result in an academic elite simply judged by a new set of metrics?
At last week’s Web 2.0 Expo Alan Patrick from Broadsight (strategy consultancy on Web 2.0) concluded his talk saying ‘Don’t make the user the free lunch’. He pointed out throughout his talk that free content causes problems. One example is Facebook – as they own your content they can make money from it, making you, the user, the free lunch.
He gave a really useful view on the limits of freeconomics. Free fails as every node in your network has a transaction cost. Your costs increase with growth.
Basic economics suggest that if you price something correctly in a market you can get demand. So, if you make something free does that create infinite demand? Only if something is new and unique. If everyone does free, you spend to keep your share, paying customers to come to you.
He also pointed out the problem with advertising based business models. In 2009 the total value of the US advertising market is $50bn. Google have a quarter of the market share and other major players take up most of the rest, leaving start-ups fighting for long tail advertising budgets. If everyone wants to be a $100million company, there is room in this long tail for about 100 companies globally. In addition, if you are making ad revenue from content and you don’t own the copyright, you will get sued. He argued that the YouTube business model is flawed due to the high cost of monitoring video for copyright infringement. Most people don’t have their own content, they use YouTube as a distribution mechanism for copyrighted material.
He sees the 4 freeconomics myths as :
sustainable free content
others will give you stuff for free
unmetered hosting and distribution
open free services
Digital sharecropping – the top sites harvesting profits from free labour in terms of user generated content – has been a point of discussion for years. Alan referenced Mike Arrington’s post in TechCrunch, These crazy musicians still think they should get paid for recorded music which suggests that both the content provider and the site owner get value. Arrington argues that social media sites raise the profile of the media producer and allows people to succeed based on talent and demand.
Alan said that the rise in paid-for TV is evidence that people will pay for quality content (end users and advertisers) when lower quality content floods the free channels.
He identified the main risks in a freeconomic model:
Acquisition costs – are you more expensive to run than anyone else? Reduce costs, do something others don’t do and that people value to avoid high marketing costs.
Distribution costs – community care costs on social networks, hosting costs on video sites.
No added value – in the current economic climate this can’t be about cool stuff, it has to be about stuff that saves money. Do you know what users really really want (nice reference to the Spice Girls here proving his point this isn’t about the cool stuff)? Think quality and productivity. A deeper relationship between you and your user is necessary for success.
Models include:
Razorr and blade model – mobile phone companies give you something really valuable upfront to take the risk away from the purchase, then make their money back through call plans.
Freemium – supplying premium services that users want at cost. This is difficult to retrofit, as you must know what people would pay for. You can lose users introducing paid for services they don’t want. Premium services are only going to be taken up by a small percentage of your users so you need a huge user base to make money at the prices people are willing to pay.
Pay per poke – gaming model. Alan gave the example of H&M fashion in Sims2. Boys have worked out that if you dress avatars (even in girls fashion) they perform better so they are buying the fashions!
Advertising – make it easier to advertise with you and provide good metrics for advertisers if you want to get some of that long-tail budget. Consider a payment model for removal of ads.
