From free to fee

Next session is a speaker from the Open University talking about changes in Higher Education, and how we should respond.
OU has been on a journey from late night BBC programmes, (they are proud of training the most number of inebriated physicists ) to co producing programmes like Frozen Planet with the BBC. 45% of people in UK watched at least one episode of it. The OU built on this to sell their Frozen Planet course. From free to fee.

We don't all have relationship with the BBC, buth there are other Free to Fee channels we can use. For example, YouTube. one of worlds top search engines. The OU have created lots of very short courses as tasters for their substantial ones. We cod all do the same.

Another channel is iTunes. OU have been on iTunesU for 2 years and have just passed 75m downloads. They are the most downloaded university in the world, beating institutions including Harvard.

We all need to embrace these new methods of delivery and marketing to leverage from free to fee.

The OU Anywhere app was launched last year, and provides everything for a course in one place, lecture notes, videos etc. available on a mobile device. The world has moved to mobile and tablet - 75% of logins to facebook now are from mobiles - we have to accept that the desktop is dying and we need to move to mobile delivery.

The OU was a partner in establishing Futurelearn, the UK MOOC delivery platform which currently has 41 Universities set up, and partners with BBC and British Library. They built it for mobile first, had an engaging environment and had employment outcomes at the start of the journey. Completion rate is 3 times higher than major rival and it hs a 75% student satisfaction rating.

There is a huge appetite for a UK education globally, and we should capitalise on that.

From free to fee. :-)



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