In preparing the Higher Ed Experts talk I gave today, I started thinking about the size, scope and likely audience of our Course Profiles Facebook app, compared to an app designed "to attract the largest number of users as quickly as possible", as was the case with "Kiss Me", another of the apps covered in the Facebook Applications webinar series.
The first thing to mention is that Course Profiles was built originally to appeal to current OU students who were already on Facebook. Looking at the OU Facebook Network page today, I noticed there were just over 6,000 members. Since membership of an academic network requires the user to have an email address for that institution, this number - 6,000 or so users - is thus likely to be less than then number of actual OU students who are on Facebook.
Membership of a network is automatic if you have registered on Facebook with a particular email address. Institutions can also set up a public profile page on Facebook that anyone can see and anyone can associate with by becoming a fan of the page. At the time of writing, just over 5,500 people have fanned the Open University on Facebook. I'm guessing this set overlaps with the membership of the OU network, but is not a subset of it...
Another useful piece of intelligence about people on Facebook who have declared an OU allegiance are the members of the general OU social group. Membership of that group today stands at about 2000.
Even if each of these groups were totally distinct - that is, let's assume members of one are not a member of either of the others
- this would give a population of less than 15,000 people who had declared an allegiance with the OU through one of the three biggest OU forums on Facebook. Course Profiles currently has almost 4,200 users.
The saturation level - that is, the maximum possible uptake - for an application such as Course Profiles is thus a relatively small number of users. For a particular instance of an application designed to support current members of a single institution, your user base is only likely to ever number in the thousands, with two exceptions:
1) an HEI may have a large number of alumni, maybe an order or magnitude larger than your current population; and
2) it may have a large potential audience base (though again, this is likely to max out at less than two orders of magnitude larger than the number of current students in your institution.
(There are exceptions - the Open University raises it's profile through BBC broadcasts, though even with audiences for some programmes numbering in the millions, this is still less than 2 orders of magnitude larger than our current student numbers (approx. 150,000 at the current time)).
The other way of growing Course Profiles numbers would be to offer it to other institutions, growing it in much the same way that Facebook originally took off. We keep talking on and off about how we might make Course Profiles available for use elsewhere, so if you're interested, please get in touch... Just bear one thing in mind - we don't really want to get involved in application support!
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Tags: fb, facebook, course profiles
Posted by ajh59 at March 6, 2008 07:19 PMI don't know much about the Course Profiles application, and apologies if these seem like stupid questions, but why did you create the the Course Profiles application in the first place and what are the actual or perceived benefits from it?
Posted by: Andy Mee at March 7, 2008 01:58 PMYou can read a brief history of the Course Profiles Facebook application here:
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The application was designed to let students badge themselves with the names of courses they had taken (a feature of the original facebook application that helped it grow in the early days, that was removed in summer 2007).
We also wanted to explore how we could leverage a social network in an OU-centric way, without intruding on, or forcing institutional systems into, the students' space.
As more students installed the application and badged themselves with it, we were able to start offering courser recommendation services, and study buddy finding services.
There were several original reasons for doing the app:
1) an interest in visualising the 'course graph' - that is, from a students point of view, which courses were taken together. (I'm not allowed to use the official OU data in the third party, public visualisation tools - like IBM's Many Eyes tool - using official OU data; so i got my own! ;-)
2) an interest in building a facebook app - just because.
3) a recognition that OU students have a desire to gather around course codes, and happily declare the course they have taken to the world. Questions on the OU network along the lines of 'how can i add course codes to my profile page' are also a bit of a giveaway as to how people wanted to decorate their profile with ou related stuff...
Benefits - help students build friendship networks; provide a course recommendation service (people who declared this also declared that);provide me with authentic data on the "course graph"; real experience in developing social network applications; a real basis for exploring how to integrate institutional and third party systems; generate some traffic into OU course pages (the course has generated some student registrations, for example).
Posted by: Tony Hirst at March 7, 2008 02:40 PMPS visualising course profiles:
http://tinyurl.com/2d6dun
Related: visualising openlearn courses
http://tinyurl.com/2f2eyl