Clearing out my laptop bag this afternoon on my way back from an HE Academy event at Microsoft in London (where I took great pleasure in: a) using my Mac; and b) watching a Vista laptop repeatedly fail to play a Flash movie/crash IE7 ;-), I came across an old (Sept-Oct, 2006) and unread edition of Open House, the OU staff newspaper. There were a couple of things in there that particularly caught my attention (over and above the VC's letter where she praised residential schools, which it's worth pointing are now few and far between...)
First off, a short article mentioning the appointment of a strategic search manager (Vicki Stirling) who was appointed to "oversee web performance figures using tracking software", as well as [paraphrasing] "giving serious attention to listings in search engines such as Google".
Secondly, an article called "Thinking outside the box", which I shall repeat here in full:
HOW will we decide what courses to offer in future? How can we keep abreast of market trends and look for potential opportunities?
Traditionally, the OU has used data from HESA, the Higher Education Statistics Agency, which gives information on market size and competitors. But this has its limitations and only offers statistics on the HE market.
To get a greater understanding of popular trends and areas of growing interest, the product marketing team has subscribed to two new research sources. BARB (Broadcasters' Audience Research Board) collects and analyses data from UK TV audiences; and Nielsen BookScan [which] tracks over 90 per cent of retail and internet book sales in the UK, analysing buying trends and subject categories.
Aready we have data that confirms our analysis that some traditional subject areas are in popular decline; but other subjects such as criminolgy, parenting and genealogy are growing in popularity. We'll be using this data to help the university look at developments for its curriculum for the future.
Good stuff, eh? Sept-Oct 2006, that was.
Last month I gave a talk (mentioned in this post: Embracing Hype) on the topic of 'Harnessing the Future', in which I idled on various technologies that are on the up, and mentioned some of data the sources we could tap into to try and help us identify upcoming curriculum areas.
In particular, information on search terms used by visitors on search engines that led them to the OU site; and Nielsen BookScan data (as visualised by O'Reilly Research).
BOTH of these sources of information were new to pretty much everyone in attendance (academic representatives of several Technology departments as well as the Computing department).
Now bear in mind that one of the points of the meeting that day was to try and identify future curriculum areas; and that many of the people in attendance were/are active in developing our curricula/degree programmes, as well as individual courses.
HOW will we decide what courses to offer in future? How can we keep abreast of market trends and look for potential opportunities?
You tell me... Right hand, meet left hand. Left hand, go figure...
Posted by ajh59 at March 1, 2007 10:51 PMSurely just as important as the search terms used to get to the OU site are the ones that don't get them there. You can do that internally, as you suggested in a previous post, but isn't what's really needed statistics on terms used to search course listing sites like Prospects and UCAS? (I know OU applications don't go through UCAS, but that's not the point). UCAS make a lot of application data freely available on their website, but not what you'd want probably. You might have to request it for a fee (minimum £200 apparently).
Is it possible to get statistics on popular First Class conferences, or terms that appear in postings on there?
Oh, and best residential course ever: SXR208, Observing the Universe.
Posted by: Richard at March 2, 2007 11:50 AM