Sometimes I come across a blog posting that threatens to fire off a whole stream of thoughts, if only I could dedicate the mental time and energy it possibly deserves. The Long Tail: Eric Schmidt, Longtailer is one such post - I came across it a couple of weeks ago, and the idea of the Long Tail articulated there resonated with something I'd been backburner thinking about for some time - who do signs up to OU courses?
To set the scene, the long tail refers to a statistical distribution in which a small population of events occur very often, but the majority of event happen infrequently - that is, in the long tail.
Sometimes the OU might broker a significant deal with a large institution or company, such as the OU and the NHS, or the services brokered by OU Worldwide. These low frequency events, or partnerships, typically have a high payoff in terms of student recruitment from a single source.
Far more typical, however, are individual students who sign up for OU courses. And here, perhaps, is where the idea of the long tail perhaps comes into play. Consider the number of students who sign up for a degree (6 to 12 assessed courses) with the intention of completing it in 6 years say. Or the number of students who just sign up for one or two particular courses arising from a CPD need, or ineterest even. Some of these students want to be assessed, but a significant percentage don't. Then there are the short courses, which are assessed, and OU study packs, which aren't.
Just how the students taking this increasingly 'informal' study options are distributed I'm not sure, but I'm sure there are curves to describe the situation...
And so the long tail perhaps describes a large market, if we can cater for it. Look back at Google:
If you look at the advertiser, the market we're in, how do we do from the largest companies - Wal-Mart - in the world, all the way down to the smallest companies in the world, the single individual. We call this The Long Tail...We looked at this and we said, we've been doing really well up until now in the middle part of this. Well-run, mid-sized businesses, smart people solving interesting problems. But how well do we do against the problems of the very largest customers?
And what about the individual contributor, the small business, the company where Joe or Bob is the CEO, the CIO, the CFO and the worker and the support person--a one person company, a two-person company, a three-person company?
The NHS deals - they're like Google's Wal-Mart clients. The middle tier customers - they buy degrees. But what about the little guys - buying a single study pack, or a short course or two. Do we consider them 'core business'?
[Another way at looking a the long tail is to consider degree and course registrations in turns of volume (I could look this stuff up, but to post it here would perhaps breach a 'commercial confidence'?!), and to look at how this is changing over time (in fact, I'n not so sure the long tail thinking would apply here...)]
One area I'm particulary interested in is outreach - getting people involved in a learning journey that starts with really informal learning, such as museum visits and attending the theatre, or a science festivals. This population can form a realllllllllllllly long tail I think - but how do we cater for it?
One way may be to take significant chunks of OUr content open, and make it freely available on the web.
The OU did this for years with its broadcast material - did that do our core business harm? (Perhaps it did, in the sense that the brand people are still trying to get the OU away from the kipper tie, long hair and sandles confused academic look...Hmmm - perhaps that's why why they don't support our robotics outreach stuff ;-)
If the OU gets its revenue from selling qualifications, then giving the content away is not detracting from core business.
If students are just purchasing the content, then are we living a myth pretending to ourselves that degrees are our core business?
I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies,Posted by ajh59 at May 27, 2005 11:20 PM
this is the dawning of the rest of our lives
Green Day, Holiday