OUseful Info

BBC Trust Report on bbc.co.uk

Okay, so I'm getting really lazy with the blog lately (been churning the words, just not in public:-( so here's a bit more cut and pasting, this time not even from me. Instead, it's from the BBC Trust report on bbc.co.uk, the Beeb's online presence.

I figure I can getaway with the huge quote becuase it's not likely that anyone's gonna click through and read the report, right?

Anyway, here are the bits that are of particular relevance (maybe) to the OU, and the OU Broadcast strategy review (which I guess since it has finished now probably means no-one's interested in what's happening in broadcast any more? Even the intranet search no longer returns anything relevant when I search it for broadcast review, and when I search for the phrase "broadcast review" (i.e. in quotes, the intranet search gives me no hits at all...

And what's the result?

Hmm... I just repeated the search with broadcast strategy review, which got some hits, then repeated the broadcast review search - and it too gave some hits this time... crap ones, though... lots of docs titled editable:doctitle and Working file... WTF? Internal readers - here's the link: http://intranet.open.ac.uk/bsr/index.php. If you find the 'interactive' display as irritating as I do in navigational terms, here's the 'accessible' version which, errr, doesn't have links to the video clips, so you'll have to download and read the Word doc transcripts... sigh... Good job it's virtually impossible to find... and why, I wonder, isn't it public anyway...? Hmm - anyone fancy trying making an FOI request to get hold of the review 'report'?)

Anyway, where was I.... ah yes, the BBC Trust review... Here's what they said about education:

Education and learning
bbc.co.uk plays a vital role in contributing to this public purpose.

bbc.co.uk's Service Licence commits it to offering something of educational value to people of all ages through both formal and informal learning and a comprehensive service for children. Its output includes a broad range of formal and informal educational content for both children and adults.

The BBC has a strong formal learning portfolio online. The on-demand and personalisable characteristics of the internet make it more suited to the delivery of learning media than broadcast media in many ways and the BBC is increasingly focussing its formal learning activities online. For example, the BBC is progressively reducing the amount of schools programming broadcast on television and moving it online.

Another example is the BBC's long-running language teaching courses which are now delivered primarily online and are well-regarded by users.

Within the BBC Schools area, the BBC has two main formal education offers for children: Bitesize, which is heavily used by GSCE students in particular and Blast, which supports creative skills development. BBC Schools also provides teacher and parent support materials and other learning resources for children.

While we give some headline findings here, we will review the effectiveness of the BBC's formal learning offer for children and young people in more detail when we review BBC output for these audiences later this year.

The BBC's online formal learning areas have high volumes of use - BBC Schools is visited by an average of one million users each week, with GCSE Bitesize the mostpopular part of the offering. Bitesize's weekly usage ranges from around 399,000 in late 2007 to a peak of 650,000 in the GCSE revision period.

Adult learning sites, such as Skillswise and RaW, have lower overall volumes of usage but are used widely by adult education centres. These offerings are highly rated by their users, generating some very high Netpromoter scores.

Our public consultation demonstrated the value of these offerings to their users:

"bbc.co.uk is of great benefit to me personally and to my family. My children both make extensive use of it for research and revision and will increasingly do so as they prepare for GCSEs and beyond. It provides a source of reliable and trustworthy information targeted at the appropriate level for children and adults." BBC Trust public consultation

The Service Licence for bbc.co.uk needs to set out the BBC's online learning activities more clearly. While bbc.co.uk plays a key role in delivering this purpose, we have concluded that the current Service Licence for bbc.co.uk does not adequately reflect the scope of the BBC's formal and informal learning activities. We intend to amend the bbc.co.uk Service Licence following this review in order to set out more clearly the scope of BBC activities in this area.

The BBC's online content for children - via CBeebies and CBBC - is a clear strength. Both CBeebies and CBBC offer a blend of education and entertainment with content commissioned alongside television programming. CBeebies in particular receives very high quality and advocacy scores. Its average quality rating is above the average for bbc.co.uk and its Netpromoter score is over double the average. CBBC's quality and Netpromoter scores have been lower, particularly following a site relaunch which appears to have been received poorly by users

The BBC children's sites are amongst the most used in the UK - alongside fellow TV brands Nickelodeon and Disney. While the total level of usage has dropped slightly in the past year, our audience research and public consultation demonstrated how valued these offerings are by licence fee payers as sources of high quality, non-commercial, UK-originated content with clear educational goals. The BBC's online content for children will also be considered in more detail as part of our review of content and services for that audience later this year.

bbc.co.uk is highly valued by users as a resource for informal learning. This was one of the clearest findings from our public consultation and audience research.

"I looked up rubella on Google recently and it gave me all these links that were really scientific in their information and I just couldn't understand it. So then I went to the BBC website and it was really good, it had just the right amount of information and was easy to understand." Female aged 19-30, Belfast. Sparkler research

However, we believe its value could be increased even further by improved site navigation. Our audience research and public consultation suggest that many users are unaware of the full breadth of bbc.co.uk's offer, or that they have problems finding content they are looking for.

"There is loads of information on there that you just wouldn't know about, and you would end up using another site somewhere else to find it when the information is actually on the BBC site. So in that sense they are doing us a disservice by not telling us what is on the site." Male, aged 31-50, Belfast. Sparkler research

... We believe that the planned improvements to navigation and cross-site linking, as well as to the introduction of functions which allow search within audio and video content may greatly increase bbc.co.uk's contribution to the Education and learning purpose.

And also this on 'new media literacy':

The promotion of digital media literacy is key to the Citizenship purpose. The BBC provides a number of offerings for basic digital media literacy on the well-established Webwise site. Webwise still has around 130,000 weekly users. In addition to this core offer, bbc.co.uk has also developed a number of projects targeting particular types of user: the WW2 People's War site was aimed at encouraging older adults to participate in an online project and CBBC's StaySafe provides advice on safe internet use to children.

BBC management's submission sets out four goals for bbc.co.uk in contributing to digital media literacy:

- to help people through digital media jargon
- to encourage audiences to adopt emerging technologies and services encourage audiences to experiment creatively with digital media tools
- and to provide advice to enable children to explore online content safely

As BBC management acknowledges, ongoing development of bbc.co.uk's media literacy offerings is vital in order to help the BBC contribute more fully to this public purpose. Encouraging more advanced forms of media literacy may be a suitable role for bbc.co.uk to adopt as internet penetration increases. MyCBBC, which aims to give children the skills and confidence they will need to interact online, is a good example of how the BBC's role in this area may evolve. As media literacy is a key priority within the BBC's Citizenship purpose, this should be a priority for bbc.co.uk.

The BBC's plans for improved support of BBC programmes and other online offerings will include more opportunities for audiences to form communities around BBC content. We expect that the future development of non-geographic communities should focus on areas where these can do most to contribute in a demonstrable way to the BBC's public purposes.

Something I'd completely forgotten about was that the BBC offers a web search facility (read more about it here: BBC web search).

The trust queried whether the BBC should remain in this game at all...

The BBC's role in providing web search has never been clear. bbc.co.uk has had a search engine for some time, but its role in competing against other web search providers has remained unclear amongst internet users. The Graf review commented on the BBC's search engine:

"Respondents in our audience research could not clearly identify the value of the BBC search engine. Many were content with commercial tools such as Google. On balance, however, I feel the BBC should retain its search engine. Given that search is becoming such a fundamental part of how the internet is used, it is worth keeping a publicly funded UK competitor in the market place."

Our audience research and public consultation demonstrated that internet users still do not understand why the BBC offers web search.

"I have used bbc.co.uk as my homepage for some years now, but I always look elsewhere for access to the wider web." BBC Trust Consultation

We note that the BBC's search engine has a very low level of usage: it has around 3 million monthly users, compared with 28 million for Google and around 6 million each for Yahoo!, MSN Windows and Ask. We note also that it has a much lower average number of pages opened by users, compared to other search engines: an average of 4.7 pages per user, compared with 104 for Google, 32 for Yahoo! and 17 for MSN.

We have considered the role of the BBC in the web search market. In the context of a web search market which has become increasingly commercially attractive, we have considered whether there is a role for a public service search engine. We asked for additional information on the BBC's intended role in web search from BBC management and understand that its future is being debated and that there are currently no plans to develop it.

We will expect BBC management to take a clear decision on the future of the BBC's web search following this review. It is not clear to us how provision of web search falls within the BBC's remit. While Graf concluded that there was a role for a publicly funded UK web search provider, we are not convinced that this is a role the BBC can or should play, except for possibly in limited and well defined areas such as children's. We are asking BBC management to report to us on plans for its web search engine following this review and we will then report publicly on any decisions taken.

Do you think Microsoft is scared that the BBC might continue to offer a web search product? ;-)

More generally, should their be a public service search engine? Bear in mind this comment, also from the Trust review:

Personalisation may allow users to opt-out of consuming news on topics which are important but perhaps not very interesting to them, e.g. politics or foreign affairs. One of the benefits of a linear news bulletin is that the agenda can be mixed to ensure that a range of topics is covered. Given the BBC's duty to promote citizenship and civil society amongst all audiences, we do not believe it would be acceptable for the development of optional or personalised news to lead to an unduly narrow range of consumption. As bbc.co.uk's customisation develops, we will monitor the trend in reach of those editorial areas...

So what about the populace being fed a diet of (personally biased?) news and other web content from the Goog...? Just asking...

Tags: bbctrust, bbc.co.uk

Posted by ajh59 at May 29, 2008 10:46 PM