The Ed Techie

OU tops Facebook universities

Brian Kelly has a post about UK universities on Facebook. He states that the OU is the most popular university on Facebook:

"The Open University Facebook page is the top of all University pages, with 7,539 fans (with the University of Michigan way behind in second place with 5,313 fans (up from a count of 2,874 a month ago). The other most popular UK Universities are Aston University (2,976 fans), Royal Holloway (1,765), Aberystwyth University (1,655 fans), University of Central Lancashire (1,475 fans), Keele University (1,420 fans), Cardiff University (1,357 fans) and the University of Surrey (1,166 fans)."

Now we might quibble whether number of fans equals most popular, but certainly if having student use Facebook were a goal (or, even better, if it was linked to funding), then the OU would be doing well.

I think there are three possible reasons for this:

1. The size of the OU student body - we have more students, so you'd expect more Facebook fans
2. Being distance education, the use of networks such as Facebook to connect with each other is more of a motivation for OU students
3. The Facebook apps that Liam, Tony, Stuart and I developed (may seem immodest, but bear with me, there is a point beyond ego massage).

Now the first two aren't factors other universities can do much about, they are intrinsic to the nature of the OU. But, if they wanted to have a reasonable Facebook presence (a debatable goal), then is the last one relevant? Does creating University applications increase your Facebook presence?

I'm afraid we can't answer this with any solid research, but here's some thoughts. I reckon the presence of our apps has three functions:

1. They make Facebook more useful to OU students. Well, obviously, you'd hope so, but by being able to find students on your course (through Courses Profile), share stories (through My OUStory), find someone to study with (through StudyBuddy), etc, the applications take a lot of the difficulty out of using Facebook as a supplementary study tool.
2. They help create an OU community. The tools facilitate students making connections and dialogue. This provides a motivation to return, and to share with other OU students who may not be on FB. It makes the adoption of FB a viral process amongst students.
3. It shows that the OU itself endorses (although it was only a semi-legitimate project) the use of FB as a study tool and thus eases some anxieties around this.

So, my hunch is that the OU applications have contributed to the OU's popularity on Facebook, but it is difficult to quantify this (unless someone wants to give me lots of money to research it).

Ads won't fund learning (as we know it)

http://flickr.com/photos/labanex/1572962316/

Following on from our business models discussion, Tony has a really interesting post on some back of a beermat calculations on what you would need to generate from ads to match current revenue for courses. It assumes there is no other income, ie students don't pay fees, no Government subsidy, no additional services, etc. It's a bit hard to follow, so here are a few headlines.

• Current course revenue: 800,000 GBP
• Each 'page' needs to generate 4 GBP
• To make the money back on click through advertising each course page would need 1million impressions per year.
• For an affiliate model we would need every student to click through once on every page over all presentations of the course.

Now, of course, there are loads of assumptions and simplifications in Tony's model, check his original post to see these. But what it does show is that current revenue streams would not really be sustainable on a pure advertising basis, at least as we do it currently.

Now I don't think we ever thought they would be, but it's good to get some figures against it. So, let's pretend Governments stopped funding Higher Education tomorrow, how would we fund it?

Here's some thoughts:

• It would be a hybrid model
• There would be 'education classic' - ie you get the same as you do now but parents/employers pay for all of it
• There would be disaggregation of the services - you pay for some content, so
  It would likely feature some selling of additional services (assessment, support, etc)
• Ironically it might make the need for free content stronger - because you need to assemble courses quickly

But most of all it would mean we don't do education like we do now. This is the big (and necessary for his purposes) assumption in Tony's post - that new forms of return need to equal current ones. If Government funding disappeared then so would many academic jobs and functions. Education would become much leaner, so who knows, maybe the ad model could fund this new stripped back model. The question then would be who would want to work in such a system?

I have visions of an 'academic call centre' with bearded profs answering phones to queries on Heisenberg while an aggressive 18 year old manager prowls the floor, barking out admonishments:

"Russell, stop smoking that pipe!"
"Dawkins, you've been on that call for two minutes, if they haven't got evolution by now, hang up."
"Everybody - three minute journal break, then back at your desks."

If we didn't know it already, Tony's post highlights that education doesn't come cheap, particularly the sort of education system educators would want to work in.

The future of content - the eduVJ mix

Tony has posted a follow up to his original vid, so in the spirit of friendly competition, I'd best follow suit. I have taken my Future of Content post and done an eduVJ (as Patrick dubbed it) mix. I'm not sure it works as well as the first one, mainly because this is trying to make more of an academic point, so maybe the fit to the song isn't as neat.

I'm enjoying doing these though, and this one taught me some more about using Camtesia (such as save your file because it might crash out half way through). The last one was a Camtesia recording of Powerpoint, this one was all done in Camtesia. I hope you'll forgive this experimenting in public approach, it's a good way of learning.

Anyway, here it is, I'll do a YouTube annotated version later too, but this is the Blip.TV one:

YouTube annotations (on edupunk video)

YouTube now allows you to add annotations to your uploaded videos. It's very easy to do (to go back to my previous post, another example of lowering the 'cost' to the user). So, I took my edupunk video, and added some annotations, see below.

What adding comments does is potentially transform any video into an educational one. Much of teaching can be seen as providing commentary, analysis and interpretation on the world. YouTube annotation allows this second order decoding. If you combine that with the discussion permitted by comments and you've suddenly got a pretty compelling learning application. At the moment (I don't know if there are plans to change this), you can only add annotations to your own, uploaded videos. It would be much more powerful for educators if you could add annotations to other videos.

So here is my edupunk video with annotations. By adding these comments it changes from being a jokey nod to some of the people involved and edges closer to being an edupunk 101, ie you could use it to introduce the concept to novices now, in a way you probably couldn't with the original. You have a comparison now, the original unannotated version on Blip.tv and the annotated version on YouTube. I prefer it without comments, since any humour that may have been present in the original is destroyed by explanation. But the latter is a better teaching device.

[I've just tested this and despite what YouTube says, the embedded version seems to lose the annotation - click on the vid to go to YouTube where the annotations do work]

Here comes everything

I've been reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. In it he argues that organisations have costs that means they struggle to compete with masses because the masses can afford to have lots of failures, because the cost of failure is low, and the ease of organising is now drastically reduced. I made a similar argument in the Future of Content, by using natural selection as an analogy. Natural selection can afford to make lots of mistakes because it has thousands of individuals and millions of years to experiment over. An individual designer cannot afford to have so many dead-ends. But when it comes to producing complexity, this massively distributed process wins.

Shirky's argument is that social communication tools have lowered the threshold for organising. He gives an example of organising photos from an event - previously this would have required someone to organise it, to get in touch with all possible photographers, to collect and publish their photos. Now all that's required is that people stick them up on Flickr, and use a tag, independently of each other. The cost of organisation has collapsed overnight.

Things such as eduglu, sociallearn, loosely coupled teaching apps, and PLEs have been much on mind recently, so when reading Shirky's book I thought some of the same arguments he makes for organising people could be made for technologies. The 'cost' of organising, or integrating, applications used to be high, but through approaches such as widgets, RSS, web services, etc this cost has drastically reduced.

To make my point here are a couple of Shirky quotes which I'll then rephrase for technologies.

"By making it easier for groups to self-assemble and for individuals to contribute to group effort without requiring formal management, these tools have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort"

becomes:

"By making it easier for tools to (self) assemble and for applications to contribute to the environment without requiring integration, these approaches have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of any individual to create their own environment"

And this Shirky statement:

"because the minimum costs of being an organisation in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organised way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action."

Can be recast as:

"because the minimum costs of being an integrated environment in the first place are relatively high, certain applications may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organised way. New data techniques are altering this equation by lowering the costs of integrating all applications."

So, it isn't a case of here comes everybody but here comes everything. What's an educational tools? Whatever you want it to be.

D'Arcy's Camus moment

D'Arcy Norman recently 'nuked' his blog, ie he took it all down and replaced it with the image of a nuclear explosion (he missed a fine opportunity for RickRolling there). As he says

"At first, I was just doing it to make a point, but I quickly reached a point where I was almost convinced I was going to leave it nuked. I was going to toss the albatross overboard...But my blog is strictly just a bunch of words. Just a bunch of talk."

This came on the back of some of the edupunk stuff and backlash which has rather gotten bogged down in dissecting the term. Interestingly, punk itself was accused of being nihilistic, and once you've said 'destroy' there's not much else to do (which is why I ended my edupunk vid with 'Create'). It put me in mind of Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, which opens with this line

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."

He argues that a search for meaning and deity is absurd, and once we realise this, suicide is a logical conclusion:

"The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd"

(as a scientist and an educator I disagree with Camus - seeking knowledge and understanding of how things work is itself a solution to the absurd, but that's not the point of this post).

D'Arcy, like many writers, came to the same dilemma. Writing, blogging, suddenly seemed absurd, devoid of meaning. And the solution? Blogicide.

But he came back (unlike real suicide, blogicide is reversable). And that shows us that ultimately, even in the face of the absurd, the need to keep communicating is what keeps us going. I'm glad he reversed his decision, because I need someone to steal ideas from.

One for the Edupunkers

I wasn't going to post on Jim's Edupunk stuff because although I think it's spot-on, it made me feel slightly left out, and too corporate (Edupunk's don't concern themselves with things like business models). I'm not radical enough to be part of it. This was a purely personal reaction, I applaud the notion of remixing, DIY edtech, openness, etc.  I sit on things like steering committees, produce papers and write research bids after all. I may not be the Man, but I'm on nodding terms with him.

But then I watched Tony's presentation on publishing, data and copyright and felt positively inspired. I don't use this word lightly (except when talking about football) - genius.

So, I offer up the following as a homage to all the edupunkers out there. Such an obvious Hirst rip-off may be the equivalent of a middle-aged man wearing leather trousers, but even if I'm not an edupunk, like original punk, we all benefit from the changes they make to the scene. Enjoy:

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OU on iTunes

As a member of the Broadcast Strategy Review, it's good to see some of that work coming in to being, with the OU now on iTunes U.


I like the tag line "Warning: Content may transform your life". This is for the proper quality stuff, and provides a good outlet for OU material (not the sort of hashed together slidecasts I do). My hope is that its presence exerts a pressure back into the university, so that it makes more educators want to do podcasts, because they can get easily get a global audience for them.

Anyway, have a browse there's some good stuff there (David Puttnam is always good value). Only one problem - the search seems borked, I couldn't get any results:

(don't tell Tony, he gets upset about things like this).

The business of education

Tony outlined some web 2.0 business models the other day. Stephen Downes picked up on this, and commented

"[I] am compelled to think that the disaster that happens when democracy is for sale is nothing compared to what will happen when learning is for sale"

As Tony was thinking about SocialLearn, this is something I've been musing over for a while too. So, I offer this post up in the spirit of debate, because even putting the words business and education in the same sentence is heresy for some, and yet I think we will face some very difficult choices in this area over the coming decade, so we can't ignore it.

I think we should be clear that any Vice Chancellor will already tell you that education is a business. Even if students don't actually pay themselves and are funded by government, freedom of choice as to where they go, effectively creates a market. Lecturers, administrative staff and librarians don't work for free and buildings don't build themselves. Universities are therefore competing for students, and so will offer courses they think are attractive, facilities that are appealing and trade on a brand name. To this extent education is already 'for sale', and it is difficult to see how within current society it will change.

But, the situation is likely to get more complex and if the business aspect is currently hidden then it is will become more explicit. The driving forces behind this change are numerous, here are some candidates:

• Decreasing Government funding - the model of Government paying for the entire student education has been dwindling since they cut maintenance grants in the UK, and similar trends have been seen globally. With top-up grants and cutting of ELQ funding in the UK we can see a general move towards universities having to become less reliant on subsidy (I'm not saying this is a good thing, just highlighting it as a pressure on Higher Education).
• Increased competitiveness between universities - the explosion in student numbers during the 1990s saw expansion in higher education institutions. Now that these numbers have levelled off, there is increased competition between these institutions for students.
• Globalisation - many 'Western' countries specifically target overseas students, who bring in more funding. It is likely that host country universities will fight back against this, moving competition on to a global scale.
• Increased complexity in the education market - if you are a learner with a specific requirement then universities are no longer your only option. Not only are there commercial organisations who may offer training, but there are a range of other providers who have educational content which may meet your needs, e.g. Sky, BBC, The Guardian, YouTube, OERs, etc.

You may disagree with my list, but I think these are all observable forces and there are probably more. As I've already mentioned, my intention is not to argue that these are benevolent forces, but that we should recognise them and consider how higher education should respond.

I think there are two broad tactics, and then many different interpretations of each. The two main responses can be labelled political and pragmatic (they are not mutually exclusive, you could engage in both). A political response is what I guess Stephen would advocate - these argues that the existing society which creates these pressures is at fault and we should seek to change that. The pragmatic response (which I guess I'd advocate) argues that we should find practical ways of operating within this new environment.

So, to come back to the business models, here are some questions which I genuinely don't know the answers to, but which we may have to find soon.

1. Is advertising revenue ever acceptable? E.g. would ads run on a university site that provides funds for student services compromise a university.
2. Is providing free resources and tools, but charging for support and accreditation acceptable?
3. Would 2) be acceptable if the learner didn't pay, but used Government subsidised 'vouchers'?
4. Is a model that relies solely on Government funded students viable?
5. Would charging companies, not individuals, for professional development be acceptable?
6. If we believe in OERs, how do we find a sustainable model for them that allows educators to be employed while giving away their content?

And there are many more. The point is that technical and social changes are being felt by higher education. Some of this will be good, some will be bad, but we are likely to face some difficult choices, which we should start considering now.

Twitter events

The other day I mentioned that I like to Twitter when I'm watching football on TV. My wife doesn't watch, and if I'm not in a pub, it's a way of sharing the experience. Then on Saturday it was the Eurovision Song Contest. I started to watch it, but put a DVD on, then when I looked at Twitter it was awash with Eurovision comments. It struck me that Eurovision was in many ways the perfect Twitter event. It is, in fact, quite boring (none of the songs are any good), so there is plenty of time to Twitter. At the same time, it is quite enjoyable and provokes comment, so there is a desire to share. And you know that it is a communal event, so others will be watching too.

There's not much broadcasters can do with this, except maybe set up a Twitter id (e.g. Woganesque commentator during Eurovision), but this ability to share the experience online may be the the thing that saves scheduling. Sky Plus and the iPlayer have pretty much destroyed the notion of scheduling, but for programmes and events you want to share, then it has to be done at the allotted time. This obviously applies to live events (sports mainly), but also to any programme people might congregate around. It could be The Apprentice (AJ likes to tweet about this), or Eastenders.

Gapingvoid may have been dismayed by the Brits twittering about Eurovision, but in this respect his talk of social objects is correct. The future of television is not in it being a solitary experience, but in being a social one.

Think of these as 'flash social networks' - Jyri Engestrom argues that "social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.” Around TV we may see these social networks form for the duration of a programme and then dissipate. The key challenge for broadcasters is to facilitate this without stamping all over it, or going creepy treehouse on it.

[Update - Darren Waters had beaten me to it on this]