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Editor's Notes

• #2: B Great to see you all here. In this presentation we’ll be talking about the CYP-Media project, which won last year’s OE Consortium award for Creative Innovation but cost just $30 to set up. The project was developed by Tony Coughlan, who’s here with me today.
• #3: B The initial development of CYP-Media was driven by an observation that the benefits of open educational resources and open educational practices are often denied to those who most need them. For example, the content, size, format and level of resources has long been tailored to meet the needs of formal, higher education, often produced by elite institutions such as Harvard. In addition, there remains a lack of awareness about OER outside formal education and resources can be difficult to find. The Hewlett Foundation - great supporters of OER and OEP projects - identify the huge potential for OER use and production beyond higher (and formal) education when stating that ‘by enabling virtually anyone to tap into, translate and tailor educational materials previously reserved only for students at elite universities, OER has the potential to jump start careers and economic development in communities that lag behind’. A connection between OER and social justice is currently re-emerging, but much work needs to be done to ensure that the transformative power of openness is not exclusive to a well-informed, well-educated elite.
• #4: Since 2011 Tony and I have been addressing the challenge of extending the reach of openness by developing the public open scholar role, illustrated here and explained in detail in several research papers. The role revives the centuries-old role of 'public academic'. Modern-day public academics in the UK include particle physicist Brian Cox and anatomist Alice Roberts. In the US, the philosopher Michael Sandel is an example. These academics’ TV broadcasting is a largely supply-push process and is not needs-led. However, the public open scholar inverts the relationship between academic and public and can be performed by any open academic. GO THROUGH THE DIAGRAM Extension of Weller's 'digital scholar' - 'someone who employs digital, networked and open approaches to demonstrate specialism in a field'.   In 2014 we expanded the role to include social curation of resource collections on a needs-led basis.
• #5: B In 2011 Tony Coughlan began performing the public open scholar role by developing CYP-Media - a multi-platform project based around a Wordpress blog in which he curates and evaluates free multimedia and e-learning resources relevant to trainers, academics and the children and young people’s (CYP) workforce. CYP-Media usually publishes one blog post per month. CYP-media was developed in response to a realisation that there were an increasing number of multimedia resources scattered around the Internet but they could be hard to find, of unknown quality, and vague about whether they might be pirated or copyrighted materials. CYP-Media curator Tony Coughlan is well qualified to assess these resources, being an experienced tutor and e-learning author himself, and until recently a Chair and Director of a children’s charity.
• #6: B The blog posts’ reach is maximised by dissemination through this Facebook page
• #7: B and a Twitter account (www.twitter.com/CYPmedia). One advantage of platforms such as Wordpress, Facebook and Twitter is the analytics data available to account-holders. We used this data, together with an analysis of Facebook posts and tweets, to answer the following question: ‘How can multiple social media platforms be used to increase access to free, high quality learning through OER and OEP?’
• #8: T The CYP-Media.org blog cost only $30 to set up, yet its impact is substantial; indeed, in 2015 I was identified as one of UK higher education’s 50 most influential people on social media. The audience for CYP-Media has built gradually. Here we see that the Wordpress blog has received 66,000 views during the five years since it began in January 2011. The audience in the early days was negligible and CYP-Media only really took off in mid-2013, two and a half years later, when the blog began to be publicised through Facebook. Thus far, I have published 59 posts and in 2015 the blog received an average of 88 views per day.
• #9: T So, who and where are the audience? Studying the location of CYP-Media’s Twitter, Facebook and blog audiences reveals a common demographic - the audience is 87% female and most are aged between 25-44. This audience is overwhelmingly English-speaking, mostly spread across Commonwealth countries and the USA. Behind the shared English language are shared social systems and beliefs. For example, approaches to disabilities and processes like adoption are quite similar across Commonwealth countries and the USA, but can be very different elsewhere, so the resources curated within CYP-Media are not necessarily applicable worldwide.
• #10: T These analytics show the location of the audience for CYP-media’s Wordpress blog. Again, it is mostly spread across Commonwealth countries and the USA. Of more interest is the ‘Referrers’ data in the centre column. The CYP-Media Twitter account has a following of about 1600, but it directs only 400 visitors to the blog per year, compared to over 7000 referrers from Facebook. This may be due to the demographic of CYP-Media’s audience, which is mostly female and young, and so statistically more likely to be habitually using Facebook than Twitter.
• #11: T What content is popular and for how long? The viewing and sharing statistics for Facebook vary considerably for each evaluated resource and this can be partly attributed both to the resource topic and the timing of the blog posts. This is a typical Facebook item - a 28-page booklet on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), released by US government with a Public-Domain licence. It was viewed 8300 times and shared 160 times in the nine months following being posted in Facebook.
• #12: T This table shows the analytics for five consecutive CYP-Media blog posts disseminated through Facebook. Three of the posts were similarly received, with a reach of 12,000-14,000. A fourth received very little attention; it was about adoption, for which there is a small and necessarily private audience. In contrast the fifth post, covering The Natural Learning Initiative, was the most popular resource curated at that time, reaching an audience of almost 50,000. This can be attributed to it being a high-quality item on a topical issue and its timing; in Europe, June is an ideal time to be experimenting with environmental play, due to the good weather.
• #13: T While interest in some resources peaks and wanes quickly, other resources attract steady ongoing interest. This table shows the viewing history for a blog post entitled ‘Free Autism Spectrum e-books’, first published in Aug 2013. Viewing and sharing of the post was remarkably steady over the two years following its publication. This pattern is common for the e-books curated within CYP-Media, but is entirely different from the articles about MOOCs, which attract a short-term audience. In general, static items such as e-books and e-journals are much more popular than multimedia (videos and podcasts), with e-learning and MOOCs somewhere in the middle. This could be to do with perceived value; for example textbooks from the US's National Academies Press that cost $70 as paperbacks, but can be downloaded free as e-textbooks, have been particularly popular. The popularity of particular resources may also be to do with utility or necessity; for example the audience may be students needing a textbook for their studies.
• #14: T So, we know something about who and where the audience are, and what content they prefer, but what do we know about how they behave? The Facebook analytics show that audiences respond well to items that circulate within their own familiar networks, as illustrated by these interactions for The Natural Learning Initiative resource mentioned earlier. These show that less than half of the interactions were with the native post; there were more interactions around subsequent shares amongst friends and in groups. The number of Likes shows this graphically, only 13 on the native post, but 395 on shares. The number of comments follows the same pattern: 5 on the native post, but 33 on shares. These figures may indicate that only a small proportion of audiences are actively searching for items, but a much larger proportion interact with items that circulate within their own familiar networks. It may also reflect the trust that audiences have in their peers.
• #15: T While social media analytics data allows some useful insight into a project’s reception and impact, it is important to triangulate any findings to strengthen the validity of any conclusions drawn. Comparing statistics for individual posts with general patterns can be useful here, as can adopting a mixed methods approach. It should also be noted that sometimes social media analytics are inaccurate and should therefore be treated cautiously. For example, these Facebook statistics appears to show an audience of only 89 for the Natural Curiosity e-book, but those 89 individuals interacted 822 times and made over 1000 post clicks! Examining the details suggest that in fact the audience was ten times larger than indicated. It is useful to have the overall patterns shown earlier as a benchmark for rogue results like these.
• #16: B The analysis of CYP-Media clearly indicates that one individual, with a tiny budget, can extend the benefits of openness through the methodical use of multiple social media platforms. Our research led us to revise the Public Open Scholar model to include the ongoing use of analytics to evaluate the strengths of each platform and the typical behaviour of an intended audience. Above all, our study shows that it is vital to pay attention to an audience’s expressed needs (Step 2), listening, rather than just broadcasting. This is particularly important when a target audience spans multiple cultures, legal systems, countries and workplace settings. Should include consideration not only of preferred content but of preferred resource types. (Developing countries - YouTube videos - problematic - bandwidth limitations/streaming cost) Clear that beyond curating/sharing resources audiences appreciate the reviews and evaluation provided in the CYP-Media blog posts - content that an open academic who is a specialist in their field will be well equipped to provide. Our take home message: we need more public open scholars like Tony, working in their own fields!
• #17: B… Thanks for listening. The link above will take you to our page on the OE Global website, where you can find more information about our research.