OER-multimedia training videos

Social Networking

2009-10-29T00:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-18T01:58:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-18T01:55:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-03T01:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-03T01:02:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-20T15:00:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-08-19T11:26:00.000-07:00

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

9-Our First Big Problem

2009-08-19T11:17:00.000-07:00

First big problem emerges

Well it couldn't all go smoothly could it? There I am. My multimediatrainingvideos.com site, getting more and more hits, especially through my recent discovery of twitter (see twitter entry) and its power. We are really getting some serious amounts of good content up and running and the new look site is now in place. Then bang! the University moves the msc multimedia website and all my hard work has gone.

Remember what I am trying to prove is that by offering free learning content we can push more people towards the related courses, mainly the MSC and BSC in multimedia. Therefore actually boosting numbers and making money This works in about 3 ways....

People use the content on multimedia training videos.com and then decide they would like to study with us. There are direct links through to the courses
Our site has a high Google ranking and this helps push up the Google ranking of any sites that we link to. So since we link to the MSc in Mutlimedia at the University this should also have a good ranking. It did, in fact it was top but since the site has moved it has dropped off the scale. So we have to create all the links again to the new page and hope that then the Google Bot comes around it starts to push the new MSc Multimedia page up the rankings ( it took about 2 weeks for it to even get on the radar and it is now on page 3)

http://screencast.com/t/oTjylGh87

The third way is because students applying to the course can be sent to the free content and this gives them lots of information about the course and hopefully convinces them to study.

So in a way this is an interesting test for us. I have changed all the links on the training videos and hopefully slowly we will move up the ranking.

8-Twitter-It's all about Twitter

2009-08-19T09:49:00.000-07:00

Recently there has been lots of publicity about Twitter in the papers. What is surprising is just how wrong and how badly misunderstood Twitter is. What I hope to do in this blog entry is put people right about the potential of Twitter and also hopefully make you realise that it is not Twitter alone that you need to work with but a whole series of tools ( called APIs) that allow you to manipulate the data that Twitter produces

Twitter basics
At it’s most basic Twitter allows you to write short tweets where you can write about things you have read, good websites you have found, videos you have seen etc. If you share your ideas with other people interested in that area then it can be a pretty powerful way of exchanging tips and information. So most people who are really connected to Twitter, don’t use it for social purposes but use it to explore and exchange ideas around a common theme like ICT, Language Teaching etc. Now I know the question says “What are you doing?” and that was the initial idea but it is not what the “serious” Tweeters are doing. They are sharing ideas, articles, videos etc on related areas. To be honest, if I follow someone and they keep telling me what they had for breakfast, then I generally stop following them! That wasn't the case at the start. I did plenty of that too. But then I began to understand the tool.

Get a few good tweets on the board
Joining Twitter takes a few seconds. Once you are on, if you want to be successful with it then there are two things you are going to have to do. One is have good content. It could be good websites you use, good articles you have read, videos you have used. If you don’t have much to say or share then it is going to be harder to start. But not impossible ( see getting into action at the end to see why). The other thing is you are going to need to follow and get followed as without that there is not much point in using Twitter.

Getting people to follow you-idea one
The problem is how do you know who to follow and how do you get people to follow you. Well to follow people is easy. Just search for well known people in your field, or good tweeters you know about, look at their tweets and click on the list of people who follow them. For example once you are signed up to Twitter, go to "find people" and write in “macmillanelt” (if you interest is English Language Teaching) Now click on their page and look in the right hand column. Click on follow “View All” under the section where it shows you all the people that follow them. Now simple go through the whole list and follow all those people. Statistically about 50% will follow you back. Do this with a few other tweeters and you will soon have lots of people that you are follow and lots of people that are following you. This is called “piggybacking” since you are using the followers of another person to get you on your way.

Getting people to follow you-idea two
Go to "find people" again and just write related words like “ELT” or “ESL” and you will get a massive list of users who have those letters in their name. Most of them will be related to our area of interest, so just follow them all by clicking on the follow button. About 50% should follow you back.

Un-following people http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/
You can follow 2000 people. Now the problem is that only about a 1000 of them will follow you back, which is a bit unfair. Also if people see that you are following many more people than are following you, they might not think that what you have to say is that interesting. There might be people you really want to follow and who won’t follow you back but there will be many you will want to un-follow. For this you need a website called Twitter Karma. You can sing in with you Twitter account and then list all the people who you are following but how are not following you. You can then delete them. This shows you how.

Getting into action http://tweetdeck.com/beta/
Of course the who idea of Twitter is for you to be sharing stuff. It is not really about “What are you doing?” It has really evolved from that. So you need something that will closely monitor all the interesting tweets you get, allows you to save the best ones in your favourites, allows you to create groups. So for example I have a group called “My best ICT tweeters” and if I choose that group I can see what Tweets they have recently made. So you are going to need Tweet Deck for all this. Not only that but it tracks the people who re-tweet your tweets. So you can thank them and interact with them. If you regularly tweet, build up a rapport with people that re-tweet your stuff, re-tweet anything you find interesting, then pretty quickly you will get into the whole thing.

I

So what do I get out of it? How is this related to Multimedia Training Videos.com?

1. I have made loads of new friends around the world. They follow my tweets and visit my website as I sent them tweets that direct them to my content. Numbers to my website have grown massively. I am talking thousands more people. I orginally sent them to http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/ but now I am pushing them to multimediatrainingvideos.com

2. I have a constant source of new websites, articles, training videos, opinions etc all based around multimedia and ICT I put the best into my favourites and when I have time I sit down and go through them.

3. I don’t have to waste my time searching for content anymore as I get a continuous stream of new content being tweeted to me all day. This is really a benefit, especially as you soon pick up on the key people who are passing along lots of good stuff

Now I could go further. Once you have built up your tweets, got lots of people following you, you can really start to look more carefully at the people you are following. There is software that allows you to check which accounts are not really active and also to help you delete the odd spammer that you might have picked up. Once you have a big group together, you can start to refine it and as you do the experience will get better and better as you get more the interesting tweets related to your interest areas. This is a key way that we are pushing multimedia training videos.com and at the same time and hopefully directing more people to our msc courses

7-Search Engine Optimisation-Ad words

2009-08-02T14:26:00.000-07:00

Ad words
As I have said before nothing about SEO is easy. Today I signed up to ad words. It is a little bit early to be advertising the multimedia training videos site. However I wanted to learn about the Adwords tools in Google.
Adwords basically allows you to have advertisements for your websites that come up on the Google site when you write in the correct key words. So for example once you sign up, you make a four line adverstisement and then you tell Google what search terms should bring your advert up. So for example in my case the search term "multimedia training" would be one example. You can also set a limit. At the moment this is nothing more than a test to simply see how it works and so I have set the limit to $10 a day. You are only charged if the user clicks on the ad. Once my $10 has been spent in a day, then my ad won't appear.

One really helpful too is the google keyword tool. You can find it on the following address ( but you probably have to be signed up to adwords before you can use it) https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. You can write a keyword in and then press the button it will give you all sorts of information about that keyword and about related words. It will tell you how often that search term has been used in the last month and other similar search terms and their value too. It is a really invaluable tool.

This video shows you how it works.

This has been a massive help. It has given me loads of ideas on how to improve my meta data on my pages and hopefully push up the rankings of the site. I can see how useful my current meta data is and choose words that are more common. For example the words "on-line training" would have been a good meta tag to use but I had never thought of it and now realise it is a very common search term. Here is a second video more or less covering the same ground.

6-Search Engine Optimisation-Good page titles

2009-08-01T01:21:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Optimisation.
The idea of our site is to get as many users onto the site as possible. We then hope to produce quality training videos that will bring them back time and time again. If they like the quality of the training videos, we hope they may decide to find out about the courses that are related to the content. So for this reason it is vital that we push up the search ranking of our site.

The problem is the SEO is very confusing. If you watch SEO videos on youTube you will get hundreds of tips about tools that need to be used to optimise you seearch ranking. Some of them are useful, some of them tell you nothing and some seem to contradict each other.

What we identifieid at the beginning of things we needed to do were the following

Make sure all the videos have a good title. This was not the case when starting this project and we realised that we need to go back and give each index page a better page title
Make sure that all the content was on one site. We were using two servers and this was making it hard to use GA and also hard when loading content.
Make sure all the videos had good meta data and key search terms. So the descriptions and meta words all needed to be checked
Make sure that each set of videos had a link back to the main page and a simple quick description of what those videos were about
Build up a collection of good links to other sites and inform the sites we were doing this
Build up a good collection of useful blogs and tell thes bloggers we were linking to their blogs from our site
Create our own newsletter, just as had been previously done on http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/ , which now has about 1000 subscribers.
Have our own blog

These were more or the less the list of things we planned to do. However as we learn more and even as I speak this list is probably going to change and increase.

Getting all the content onto one server

We manage to more or less have all the content onto one server and organise the index page by about 20th July. However we did have problems and using a university server may not have been the best idea. Bureaucracy always slows things down and it maybe at a later time we decide to run the service from outside the university. For example at the moment some of the lastest Camtasia videos don't work on the server and I am having to run them from another server and point to this. Why they dont' run is not clear but sorting out the problem is difficult ( people are away) and in many ways it might have been easier to set up the server outside ( my other site http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/ is so much easier to sort out because I simply call up the person who runs the server)

Re-titling the pages

We are just about ready to do this. I am paying a member of staff to go through all the index pages of the videos and adding relevant meta words , better descriptions and better page titles. I am also asking him to add a few words to the top of the video ( ie actually will come out on the page itself rather than be hidden in the meta data) , which describe what the videos are about and also has a link back to the main page http://www.multimediatrainingvideos.com/.

One useful video I found about titles was this one

5-Producing the content

2009-07-31T02:30:00.001-07:00

Producing the content

We began work on the project in May. The first thing we needed to do was to get up as much content onto the site as possible. There is no point in getting a lot of people to a site if there is not enough content to keep them there. This had been my experience with http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/ The key is having enough content to bring them back.

Immediately we had a problem. The videos produced by various members of staff were not really useful as they were not really done in the same way as the content on multimediatrainingvideos.com. We have content from a number of members of staff for HTML, Javacript, Flash etc. We decided then to actually reproduce the content.

Most of the staff already use Camtasia, so training wasn't a problem. We also had example video sets on-line so that the staff could watch them and get a good idea as to what to produce. Making the videos can be very quick if you know what you are teaching, know how to use Camtasia and have a good idea of the contents.

I asked staff to submit lists of content for various video sets. These included an introduction to Flash CS3, Introduction to Photoshop CS3, Introduction to HTML, Introduction to Word Press etc. We didn't want really polished videos. We felt that a more natural style was better and if we had have changed the style , we would have had to have gone back and changed them all.

All the staff knew they had to give up the copyright to their work. In exchange we paid for their content and also publicised the fact they had worked on the project. They also knew that we intended to release the content on a creative commons license. We produced a short contract that agreed to pass the copyright of any content they produced for the site to the University of Westminster and that they understood that this content was going to be released on a Creative Commons License which would allow use, repurposing etc as long as used for non-commercial purposes.

Producing a set of videos ( about 25 short 1-3 minute videos) takes about 3 to 4 hours if you are competent using Camtasia and also know your subject area. We agreed that a fee of £450 per set would be fair. This maybe a little cheap, however it was based on various pieces of work I had previously done for commerical purposes and also based on the fact that the website already has a certain amount of "credibility" and that by being on it, the staff would get good exposure.

We also decided that at the first stage, we would concentrate on getting the videos done before adding lecture notes and other files. In a recent survey, 90% of students said they wanted more training videos and so we felt this was priority.

What are we going to produce?

We set out to develop the following sets initially. I based my choices on the needs of the students on our courses and knowing a fair bit about what is also taught on other multimedia courses around the country

HTML-2 sets Mike Taylor

PHP - 1 set Mike Taylor

Javascript -1 set Mike Taylor

Dreamweaver 1 set Paul Trotter

Photoshop 2 sets Savraj Matharu

Premiere 2 sets Russell Stannard

Word Press -1 set Tim Lindsay

Flash- 3 sets -Savraj Matharu

The target is to have all these sets up and running and on the site by end of September, ready for the new year and then begin to add them to other repositories such as Jorum , youTube and possibly iTunesYou.

Problems -keep down the size of the videos at compression stage

There were not too many problems with the production of the content but one thing to keep in mind is the size of the videos. We need to keep the videos small in size and this can be done in a various ways

-set the screen capture size to the size of the final size of the planned videos ( or at least make sure you have a 4:3 ratio as it makes it much easier to resize

-I am not sure but keeping the colour information to 16 bit ( or even lower) if possible on your screen should ( I am guessing here) keep the video size down

-Make sure you have agreed on the content before starting. This will help the producer to keep the video length down

-Test the sound before starting. Computers tend to vary massively in the way they record and this will have an impact on how much your can compress the sound. A highish recording level will allow you to reduce the sound down at compression stage

4-The Team

2009-07-25T01:04:00.001-07:00

The Team
Even though this is supposed to be an individual project, there are a large number of people involved in the project.

Russell Stannard
Russell (Me) is the project manager. I started the project with £5,000 of funding from the University of Westminster EIC after the success of http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/ which was a hobby of mine. I organised the project, run it, made final decisions on what to do and not to do and produced some of the content. I also spent a lot of time finding out about Search Engine Optimisation and marketing of the site. I built some content in Director ( already there before project started) and in Premiere.

Savraj Matharu
Savraj is basically a multimedia guru and has played a major part in the whole project. He can make great training videos, knows lots of different technologies and is making a lot of the content for the site. He will be making content in Flash and Photoshop.

Michael Taylor
Mike teaches HTML, PHP, Javascript etc on the MSc in Multimedia and will be developing content for these areas. He has previous experience producing training videos.

Panos Kolivanis
Panos designed the website, set up the newsletter and gave lots of advice on building up the search rankings.

Paul Trotter
Paul is an invaluable member of the team because he is doing a lot of the tough and repetitive stuff like adding in the metatags to the pages, making sure all the links are working, searching for articles for the team to read, improving all the descriptions on the index pages etc. He also produced a set of videos in Dreamweaver.

Noureen Tejani
Has perhaps the most frustrating job because initially the vidoes and index pages were sitting on different sites and this made her job really difficult.

Tim Lindsay
Tim produced a set of videos for Word Press

3-Getting the Google rankings up high

2009-07-25T00:29:00.001-07:00

Getting the Google rankings up high
There are two reasons why getting the Google rankings up is so important. The key thing that we are trying to prove is that by offering OER content we can improve the marketing of the courses that are related to it. Obviously the more people that use the site, the greater chance we have that some of them will link onto the information about our courses. However there is a second and in many ways more important point. If you have a good website that generates a large amount of traffic and has many sites linking to it (http://www.multimediatrainingvideos.com/ MMTV) then if you link this site to other sites it will help to push up the ranking of those sites. So for example if you link to the MSc in Multimedia course at the University, it helps to push the ranking of that site up.

At the point of starting, MMTV was already on the first page of Google with the search term "multimedia training." By linking the page to the MSc Multimedia site we have been able to push the ranking of the MSc Multimedia site too. So currently the search term "MSc Multimedia" or "MSc Interactive Multimedia" returns the MSc at the University of Westminster 1st on Google. This sounds better than it is really is. What is important is the search terms that students looking to do courses use. So for example if we find that most students use the search term "Masters Multimedia" to find multimedia courses then being number one with the search term "MSc Multimedia" is not that useful.

Our goal is to learn more about the search terms students might use to look for our courses and then try as possible to get the highest rankning possible. Exactly what those goals are will become clearer as the project goes on and as we gather information from the Google Analytics too, it may also help. However here are a few basic goals we have even at the early stage

If you write "Flash Training" we want Google to be returning the MMTV site on the first page
If you write "HTML Training" or "Photoshop Training" again we are looking for the highest possible ranking for MMTV ( again lots of guesswork here as I am guessing that these are common search terms)
Ultimately you want the word "multimedia" to return our site on the 1st page of Google but that might not be a realistic goal! Out of interest if you currently write multimedia into Google then the MMTV site is not even in the top 10 pages. In fact I don't know where it is as I gave up looking.

What can we do to help the rankings

In truth I don't know the answer and it maybe something that I learn about through this project but the following seem to help

As many hits as possible
Lots of links from other sites
Good metatags ( which should be influenced by the information we get from Google Analytics)
The headers in the index page where you write the description of the site
The headers within the pages and the text you use.
Having an XML site map to help point Google to the content
Lots of links from social networking sites and blogs
Twitter
Having example content on YouTube , TeacherTube etc

There are more and it is our intention to work through all these and make sure we are trying to do them all. I also plan to attend a two day course on "Search Engine Optimisation" in July and will write about the results of that here. The bulk of the work for getting the rankings up will take place from about October onwards as there is little point in working on a high search ranking if the content is not in place.

2-What we have to do

2009-07-24T00:38:00.000-07:00

At the start of the project in May 2009 we had the advantage of already having a website in place with a large number of sets of videos and a good user base within the University. The task ahead of us can be broken down into several sections.

Content

Produce more content either through re-purposing videos already made by other staff or by producing new content. Areas we need to develop include HTML, Dreamweaver, Flash, PHP, Word Press etc.

Improve the metatagging of the content which at the moment is very patchy

The home page

We need to link the content much more to the University of Westminster. We need to change the home page to give it the correct look and feel and build in a stronger association with multimedia courses at the University through banners etc

We may in the long run also look into doing the same with the video player, so that it has a certain look and feel that links it to the University. Currently we use the default players that Camtasia offers.

Google

Getting up the Google rankings is one of our highest priorities. At the time of writing this blog ( started in July 2009) we had already got the google rankings up to number 2 with the search term "multimedia training". At the start of the project , back in April 2009, the site was coming up intermittently on the first or second page. We believe that it is vital for the success of the site that it achieves the highest possible Google ranking. Building up links to the site, getting more users, good meta-tagging etc are all key ways that this can be achieved.

Greater exposure

The content of the site needs to be added to a whole variety of media outlets. We intend to add the content onto Open Jorum, iTunes, YouTube and possible teacherTube etc to give as much exposure to the content as possible.

Getting the message out

One of the key successes of teachertrainingvideos.com (TTV) was the ability the author had in getting the message out about the site. This was through articles, papers, talks and even two national press pieces. We will need to do the same with MMTV . A key thing will be to get as many conference papers, journal articles and possibly even national press articles about the site. The possibiltiy of advertising the site has also been discussed.

Analysis

We will need to analyse the use of the site but using Google Analytics (GA) and this will give us in-depth information into how the videos are being used, where the people are coming from, what videos are the most popular and how many people link through to our website.

A second and key part of the analysis will be looking at the educational impact of the videos on learning, on the perception of the courses and on the students reaction to them. This can only be done, later on in the project when the students have used the content.

1-Introduction

2009-07-24T00:06:00.000-07:00

This blog is a record of a research project equally funded between JISC and the University of Westminster. It describes and records the work done on http://www.multimediatrainingvideos.com/. A open educational resource website that has a serious of walk through videos that show the public how to use Director, Flash, Photoshop etc. As part of the funding, the site is increasing the number of videos. This will include new areas such as HTML, Javascipt, PHP, Dreamweaver and other tools such as Word Press.

What are the objectives of the site?

The key objective is to show that by offering students free content on the web, we can attract more students to do courses in multimedia at the University of Westminster. In other words OER can be a way of marketing courses and getting more students on the course. If the website can generate enough traffic from outside of the university and those students like the content that is on offer, they may decide to find out more about the multimedia courses that are running at the University. One of the key factors to its success will be the search rankings and getting a high search ranking on Google

The website was actually started in January 2007. It was based on the success of http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/ a website that offers training videos to teachers. http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/ (TTV) has a very high search ranking. If you write "teacher training" into Google it currently comes in at number 4. The site has generated a look of work for the author. Teachers, associations, universities, conference organisers regulary contact Russell Stannard and ask his to present and talk. It was from this that the marketing opportunities for a similar site for multimedia began to evolve.

The second objective is to analyse the educational impact of using Camtasia style training videos to support learning. Since the site was formed, several questionnaires have been produced along with students and there is very clearn evidence that the students are making use of the videos and that they like them as a learning resource. Just 3 months after the site was first created, a simple tracking of the site showed 60,000 hits on the site. In the first questionnaire over 90% of the students said they wanted more training videos rather than more lecture notes.

The evidence so far

We already have some evidence that the http://www.multimediatrainingvideos.com/ (MMTV) website is impacting on student numbers. The site is directly related to the MSc in Multimedia course and the content is built around the modules on that course. In the 2008-2009 academic year, there were 19 students on the course. This was an increase from the previous year of 12. The students were asked why they chose to study at the University of Westminster. 7 students out of 19 said that the content on the website had been a factor in deciding to study on the MSc in multimedia and 4 of the students said that it had been the deciding factor.