EduGlu Sandbox

Yesterday (err, Tuesday) I took part in a very enjoyable OU/BBC brainstorming session on “multiplatform ideas for a younger audience (17-24 yr olds)…as a new way of working for the future”.

(I asked: multiplatform is pretty much everything that is not “linear TV”, where “linear TV” is, err, scheduled, traditionally delivered (and scheduled) TV content, I think…?! I’m not sure if it’s still linear if you’ve timeshifted it or are watching it through iPlayer, though… err…? Web stuff, events, and so on are all classed as ‘multiplatform’.)

The session involved several time constrained (15 minute or so) sessions on set topics, in three groups of 8 so, with sharing back to the other groups after each session.

Anyway, as part of the event, we heard about a couple of possible co-pro programmes, including one very exciting one (for prime time) that is going to pilot anytime. (It’s, err, am I allowed to say? One thing at at least, maybe: it’s definitely NOT like Tomorrow’s World…) Thinking about that programme, though, it wasn’t clear whether we had signed on to do it as a co-pro (OU/BBC co-production… you know, stuff like James May’s Twentieth Century (and the forthcoming James May’s Big Ideas), Rough Science, and Coast…). Hmm…

A particularly entertaining part of the session was a pop quiz/bar quiz on what the kids are into…(even with the BBC Controller of Knowledge on our table, we still didn’t win…!)

So here are some of the results… For 16-24 year olds (such is the way BBC audience research segment their audiences):

- BBC1 and ITV1 are the most popular TV channels (with the other terrestrial channels close behind), with 85% reach, though declining year on year since 2001;
- In 2008 (?), the top 5 programmes were: Britain’s Got Talent, Eurovision Song Contest, Brit Awards, UEFA League something or other, Soap Awards;
- most popular media: mobile (32%), internet (24%), TV (11%);
- 96% have at least one mobile phone, and a large percentage send umpteen SMS/text messages per day;
- top 5 websites are Google, MSN (IM presumably), Facebook, BBC, Youtube; (all presumably score on multiple daily visits - BBC is good for sport, weather, info);
- hardly any of them ever look at a newspaper.

(There’s some more old data/insights on the BBC commissioning site for this demographic too - BBC Commissioning (16-24 year olds, youth). Everything there is probably more true now…)

Not surprisingly, none of us new what the favourite OU courses were among 18-24 year olds, though I think the VC mentioned what percentage of our student population as a whole fell into that category. I also realised that I wouldn’t know how to even find out which courses in our Faculty, say, were most popular in terms of: a) raw numbers; and b) percentage of the overall course demographic. Any OU readers know the answer, or how to find out the answer?

Something else I picked up - any TV programme that lasts an hour was not made for the audience’s benefit (or something like that ;-) Even getting people to hang around for half an hour is an achievement, apparently…;-)

One of the desired outcomes of the meeting was that we should have definite things to build on… One clear statement was that future co-pros should be commissioned as multi-platform plays. I’m hopefully going to be working on some Digital Planet co-pros for BBC World service, so it’ll be interesting how far we can push the web stuff under that banner on open2.net, especially as the World Service don’t really push web adjuncts to radio at all…

Another outcome was that we should use blogs and wikis to keep the conversation going… I have to admit, I sighed… the we need blogs’n'wikis and then it’ll be alright phrase always makes me sigh… I was going to suggest that if we followed each other on twitter it’d probably be more useful, but I guess I’d have needed someone like James Cridland in the room to back me up that such a service existed and might in fact be useful…;-)

Now, if someone had said “and the discussion tag we should use is…” I’d have probably fallen off my chair, but until that becomes the norm (and people know what it means in practical terms), using “blogs’n'wikis” is not going to be the answer… IMVHO, of course;-)

(That said, I can see that maybe people would want the conversation/related info kept to some private backchannel… But I reckon every layer of privacy makes it harder to access, and therefore harder to engage with? And we’d be looking for a private backchannel that could cross two institutional boundaries - OU and BBC… Sigh…)

PS having a quick scout around, the only blogs I’ve found so far from others who were at the event are these occasional affairs: Mark Brandon (open2.net), Richard Williams, BBC Internet blog, Dan Gluckman. I have no idea whether anyone there twitters, or whether there are any others still (actively) blogging…?

PPS in the bar the evening before the brainstorm, we had an interesting chat about the extent to which the iPlayer is, or could become, a device independent channel in its own right. This is a note to self to post more about that another day…

PPPS looking the the OU presence on youtube just now, it looks like they’re gearing up for the full OU on Youtube release…

Or as Ian Roddis, who looks after the OU web team, put it:

It seems that as an institution, we are starting to get a bit of momentum up… and then it’ll be hard to stop, like turning a supertanker round… Methinks we could be in for a fun year or two :-)