Hulu is viral. Just a few months after its debut, it became the 10th most visited US video site on the web. That’s more viral than the flu in a dirty daycare. So what about OpenCourseWare? Is there any hope for some viral sharing of OCW courses? Not that I expect it to ever spread like Hulu, but it’s worth asking what Hulu has that OCW could try (besides porn).
Perhaps the difference between courses and movies has to do with motivation and interaction. Motivation for something like Hulu is pretty easy to understand. After all, we’re talking about free, on demand SNL here. But interaction can make or break a website. With Hulu, there’s no plugin or player to download (sorry Joost, you lose.) Jason Kilar made sure the interface was ultra-clean and easy to understand. Bottom line: everyone gets what you do with a movie or a TV show. You watch it. Of course, with Hulu you can also leave a comment, plus you can take it with you (Jason had to fight for the ability to embed any Hulu video on any other website — but it worked). People get these kinds of basic Web 2.0 interactions.
With an OCW course, it’s not always clear how to interact with the content because OCW course content is not as consistent as a movie or a TV show. In one course may consist of a video lecture, another may be a course podcast, and in yet another may be simply a collection of course lecture notes in PDF format. So a visitor does not always know what to expect from a course, which in some cases may make it harder to share with others.
I don’t have the answer for how to make OCW courses spread like wildfire, but my suggestion would be to provide ways for the course content to flow easily out of the OCW site and into places where it could be discussed. Places like Facebook, Orkut, etc. Once you allow OCW content into a social networking space, people who care about the content will form groups around it. It won’t be Hulu, and I don’t know that it will ever be called viral, but I bet OCW usage will grow.