This morning I attended a webinar: YouTube on Campus: Applications, Tools & Tips for Your College. Blurb: "Creating effective YouTube videos provides your University with many opportunities to communicate with your current & prospective students. What type of content should you post online & what types of videos best connect with your students? " It last about an hour and 15 minutes, including 30 minutes of Q & A after the presentation.
It was hosted by Higher Ed Hero and cost the LTC $199.
The presenter was Justin Ware, the assistant director for broadcast and new media at the University of Minnesota. Ware's bio on the UMN website explains that he is "working to expand the use of multimedia communications by creating video news releases, b-roll and a variety of other visual and audio material. He also works with university departments to enhance their media presence, conducts media training for University experts and helps connect local television and radio stations with University sources." Nice to see that UMN has that level of support and guidance for the campus.
Ware began by talking about a UMN video specifically produced for YouTube. In this video, UMN physics professor James Kakalios discussed how he was tapped to add a physics perspective to the upcoming Warner Brothers movie, Watchmen. What Ware says Kakalios did, was to bring research and education to entertainment. Here's the UMN video. To whet your appetite, 2:42 into this video Prof. Kakalios says "Dr. Manhattan, presumably, is able to do this through his control of the quantum mechanical wave functions."
As he began discussing how to use your YouTube videos to leverage the investment made in creating them, Ware made an interesting observation. He said college age students are only in the third tier of the most watched demographics of watching YouTube videos. He said that 45-54 year olds and the next older group are ahead of college aged students. I need to email him to ask where this data comes from. If it's from YouTube's InSight analytics of the UMN videos, then it could be skewed a bit.
He also said to engage students by using campus mascots in the videos and UMN's example is using Goldy Gopher in a video about getting flu shots. In addition he suggests contests and using popular media to attract your target audience.
He touched on admissions recruitment videos, something I am keenly interested in seeing the UA do much more on. Not long ago I read an interview with an enrollment consultant who was speaking about how universities need to be hooking into social software to reach prospective undergrads. This consultant said that the most important part of your campus website is the admissions site, not the campus' homepage. So create videos that highlight what your college is known for and what you want your college to be know for.
Remember that UMN's main YouTube channel is managed out of the campus News office. So Ware says that these should be polished videos but that there is room for less polished videos. He encourages the colleges, departments and other units to have YouTube channels. These he says are good places to house lectures and student work.
In the next part of the webinar, Ware discussed the value of working with YouTube and Warner Brothers to include clips of the movie in the UMN video and featuring the video in YouTube's browse videos Science & Technology section. The video received 1.5M views, making it the second most watched university produced video on YouTube. (Q: what is the most watched? answer) This video easily lends itself to attracting a huge audience, and not because it makes physics fun. As Ware acknowledged, it appealed to the buzz and interest in the movie. I asked Heather about it and she explained its released was delayed because of issues between two movie studios and when it came out, fans of the comic book accounted for a successful first week but then it tanked and closed. To be honest, I wasn't even aware it had come out, much less come out and closed quickly. Having "Watchmen" in the title and tag list, I think, had more to do with its 1.5M views than anything else.
This is not to diminish what a great idea it is to produce this movie, the appeal of making physics fun to learn about, and quality of the video that UMN produced. That is truly exceptional and kudos go to UMN for doing this. Let's move on to the rest of the webinar's content.
Ware discussed ways to get a YouTube channel going on your campus successfully. For example, he recommended establishing accounts and identifying your purpose; understanding the value of accounts, using accounts to interact with segmented markets; figuring out what matters to your target audience; and ensuring that content is fresh and relevant.I like that he emphasized what he labels R. E. E., Research, Educate, and Entertain. Successful videos demonstrate the value of your college (Research), if your videos Educate then it fulfills your institution's education role, and if they Entertain then you keep your audience/viewers engaged in the University.
He concluded with short summary of the main points and then questions were addressed. The questions were almost all questions that have come up here at the UA. The first question asked how to create a channel; 2nd question was a really good one, about reaching a donor audience using YouTube videos; 3rd question asks about the difference between iTunes U and a YouTube channel; 4th asked if you you upload videos longer than 10 min pieces; 5th asked how to engage people directly? and 6th asked if there was someone using YouTube with students as a form of assessment (I don't understand that one); final question asked how UMN works around copyright issues. [Me: never work around copyright - always work within, request permissions, get signed releases, etc.]
I so totally appreciate your work to keep track of developments and trends in blogging, podcasting, webvideos, etc.! Other than just the sheer informational value of having you to track them, your perspective is always thoughtful and helpful! This is a great example of "Great and Good Blogging" and not to dis the " is having a hard time deciding whether to have a second latte ..." Facebook style relevations, I look forward to your posts.
Youtube could certainly support a lot of assessment OR evaluation strategies - i can imagine a number off the top of my head, depending on what kind of learning is being assessed and assuming a good strategy to deal with privacy student info issues.
cheers,
Great comprehensive report on this Webinar. Is it possible to get a pdf of the presentation? thanks