Social Networking

We have been working hard to get the social networking aspects of the course right. This is to help us push up the number of users to the site and to increase the exposure it gets. We managed to get another article into the THE that deals with this.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=408793&c=1

It is time-consuming but it does mean that you have multiple ways of accessing the content. We added the training videos to Vimeo and add small advertisements at the end of each video which help to push the users to the main webpage. Vimeo offers high quality videos. You can also build up the subscribers onto the site and be active yourself in subscribing to interesting content. We also content content from the Vimeo site via Twitter and use this as a way of pushing the content and building up our contacts on Twitter.

http://www.vimeo.com/mmtrainingvideos


As well as Vimeo we have a youTube channel. Again we use it in the same way. We have added Call outs to the start of the videos and use the site as a way of building up more contacts and pushing the users to the main site. We have been very active we building up the number of subscribers on the site. Again we can tweet the content as well and use this as a way of building up users on the main site

http://www.youtube.com/multimediatraining

Stats building up

We are beginning to get our first ideas of numbers. The basic GA is set up. This only tracks number of users and we are planning to get much more information once we move the server outside the University. We are getting about 100 unique users a day at the moment according to our GA figures.

This is not a high figure but keeping in mind that the content is really only related to 2 courses then this means that around a 100 people a day are being exposed to our material. This is not a bad publicity for the courses.

We are also running Google Ad Words. This is pushing around 10 people a day to the content from a variety of different searches in Google. These are all UK based at the moment. We have decided to move the server outside of the University as getting changes made etc is very difficult and takes time. So we hope once we have all the content outside the University we will be able to build a bigger picture of where the hits are coming from, what videos they consume etc.

We also have our first subscribers on youTube.

Technical Issues

We have found problems with some of the videos when we did a test with all the students on the MSc course. It seems the videos don't work in Firefox but they do work in IE. I am not sure if this is only the case with the MPEG videos or whether the Flash videos also create the same problems. It seems to be something to do with running and using Camtasia 6. Older versions of Camtasia don't seem to create the same problems.

Conferences

It is time to start to get some publicity out there about OER and the project we are working on. I have been invited to present at the conference in Nottingham and the one in Birmingham too, which are both linked to OER. I also managed to get a bit of publicity for my work via a conference in Berlin known as on-line Educa and they published this article about my work ( sorry about the picture)

http://www.icwe.net/oeb_special/news133.php

Nottingham Conference
OER conference at the National College for School Leadership Conference Centre in Nottingham on Wednesday 25th November 2009. http://forms.ncsl.org.uk/mediastore/image2/conferencecentre/home/index.html

Birmingham-Cetis
The conference is on 10-11November in Birmingham. You can find furtherdetails about the conference athttp://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Conference_2009_Programme

Twitter-In th Times Higher

Well back after a long break from the blog as been away for the summer and then loads to do. I have been working the Twitter account and slowly building up the MMTV.com numbers and using this as a way of getting more people to the site. We actually start the courses next week and so that is when I am hoping we can push a bigger number of people to the site. However Twitter really works and if I can have the success I have had with the Twitter account I use for teachertrainingvideos.com and do the same for multimediatrainingvdeos.com then I will be delighted. You can read the article I published about Twitter in the Times Higher here. My site and OER gets a mention
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=407984&c=1

11-Problem Solved

Back at the top

Well it took a few days. But here we are 20th August and the MSc Multimedia course is back near the top of the Google rankings. Re-setting the links from the multimedia training videos site and also from the teacher training videos site and updating the metatags seems to have pushed the course right up the rankings again. This videos show you the searches.

http://screencast.com/t/dL3bTzzhwJ

10-Are numbers on the course increasing?

Are numbers on the course increasing

It is the 17th August and still 8 weeks before we start. At present we have about the same number of students listed for this year as we did for the whole of last year. So there is a real sign that we are going to see an increase in numbers. Of course the real increase should come this year, as we now have much more content on the site and it will be during the 2009/2010 academic year that we should see a real increase in numbers. At this stage I am not going to say too much but when I started this project (in January 2008 with just a limited amount of OER content) I had HALF the number of students I currently have on the course. In just a year and a half I have DOUBLED numbers on my course. Is that because of MMTV...well there is some evidence to suggest yes but the survey I plan to do with the new students in October should give me much more information