OUseful Info

OU on iTunes U

For the last couple of months, a small team (nothing to do with me...) have been putting together an OU presence on iTunes U - and very slick it looks too (well done, folks :-): visit the Open University on iTunes U.

I had a look at the site yesterday afternoon, thanks to an internal tip off via delicious, no less, but when I asked if I was free to blog, I was asked to keep quiet until the press release - and the official announcement - came out today...

It seems that the media relations team also team took a hard line with respect to not tipping anyone off early, including the press... (or maybe we don't do embargoed press releases?)

Here's the fuill press release: The Open University offers free education content on iTunes U in the iTunes Store.

It's probably worth bearing in mind that the rules of PR 1.0 probably still hold true, especially if you don't let the web 2.0 channels prime the story using niche channels... because otherwise, you can lose control of the story:

Maybe I should have published yesterday and been damned? Note that the story has now been amended, although the OU (at time of writing) still doesn't get a link:

(What was it the recent BBC Trust report on said about 'must do better' with respect to linking to third party sites?)

So here's what the OU iTunes site looks like:

Unlike many of the other institutional offerings there, the OU presence includes broadcast and near-broadcast quality video from several of our courses, as well as talking head videos from the great and the good.

For example, here are the offerings from one of the courses from my own department:

Note that as well as video, the transcripts are also made available... And of course, the content is free... At the moment, I don't think there is any regular 'podcast' programming included - hopefully I'll have more to post about that in the near future... ;-)

PS Stuart has also pointed out that the iTunes offering is just part of a wider straegy to engage with social media. As Stuart writes in iTunes U and the OU:

This work sits alongside ongoing work with YouTube, and activity in spaces such as Facebook, Netvibes, Twitter etc. This is going to be brought together via a /use site [which] will serve as a landing page for those people visiting the OU from external web spaces and introduce them to what else is on offer. The current /use page is all we are able to offer at the moment; it will be much better in the future!

So, what's the coherent story around the OU's activity in these third-party spaces? Well i think it's partly captured by the intro text on /use; it’s about allowing people to make use of OU content for their own purposes (breaking down the us / them boundaries), it's about letting people experience what the OU has to offer in the social spaces that they already feel comfortable with and not focusing solely on driving them to a corporate website, and it's about being a genuine and valuable part of online communities.

Anyway, here are the links again: visit the Open University on iTunes U, and /use.

If you have any ideas for other content we should be making available via iTunes U, or you can think of innovative ways we might be able to use that channel, why not post a suggestion to the (unofficial) OU suggestion box?

PPS anyone interested in a little bet about when, or indeed, if, the iTunes U OU presence gets a mention on open2.net?

PPPS it seems open2 is on the case after all:

:-)

Tags: ou, itunesu, playing around the edges of that disrepute thing again

Posted by ajh59 at June 3, 2008 12:21 PM