Think of it this way, if 1 in 20 viewers bought this song for $1 , this group would have made $1 Million in a month (assuming there were 20 million unique viewers). Along with the iTunes link and the direct download link, they also sell T-shirts. That’s the power of viral web sharing. The world’s greatest marketing tool is free.

Enjoy the song…

I met Floyd at the AECT conference last week in Long Beach, and we hit it right off so I asked for permission to bring my new friend to Barcelona to attend the Open Ed 2010 conference as well as Mozilla’s Drumbeat Festival. Even the airport security guards smiled a little. Several TSA agents gathered and talked quietly, looking over at Floyd from time to time. Mostly, they just couldn’t decide what to do.

I took lots of pictures. Here are some favorites of me and my favorite pink friend meeting lots of nice people in Barcelona. Floyd will be in Jacksonville, Florida next year for AECT 2011. He wanted you to know.

For those of you who are wondering, yes, I built my own battery pack from parts at Radio Shack so Floyd could go wireless. I wanted him to have the full beach experience.

David’s comment:

I think the problem of the moment is that every person on campus is asking, with regard to their specific program, “how do you justify NOT paying for it?” And yet things are being cut left and right. In a climate where serious conversations are being had about laying off faculty, I worry that you can’t argue for a program on any merits other than “in addition to be useful, it brings in additional dollars.” But I’d love to be wrong.

My reply:

… I don’t want to stray too far from the context of my letter, which was directed at a marketing and PR committee. My point is that we have not made a strong enough case to these people. Marketing a university costs money, and the return on this investment is measured in eyeballs, visitors, or hits — not dollars. An established OpenCourseWare like USU OCW should be a marketing line item because it provides more marketing bang for every buck. Smart organizations like Talis have figured this out and are now using their marketing budgets to fund interesting projects that will enhance their reputation (http://blogs.talis.com/education/incubator/). I realize this is all stuff you know, but I’m just putting it out there for others.

Value

I think saying that OpenCourseWare needs to “bring in additional dollars” is looking at the problem too narrowly. Yes, every OCW needs to generate value, and that value must be recognized by the institutions decision-makers. I am not against OCWs earning money linking to paid courses, but I think USU OCW has something else to offer.

As I studied in the Utah State University library today I noticed several groups of students being taken on a tour of the campus, 8 students at a time. Several of the students appeared to be foreign students. How did these students decide to attend Utah State University? More importantly, how will students find and choose a university in the future (assuming universities are not irrelevant at that point)?

I am not saying Utah State University should replace its guided campus tours with OpenCourseWare; I am only suggesting that USU OpenCourseWare has incredible value as a sort of Virtual Visitor’s Center. USU OCW is essentially a “student magnet” — a site that attracts learners from near and far and showcases some of the great courses USU has to offer. It’s like the free samples at Sam’s Club.

Free samples

I believe USU OCW is more useful than a traditional advertisement because it draws the right target group: learners! USU OCW allows them a sample of some great course content available at Utah State University. And just like the free samples they give away at your local membership warehouse, it gets people interested. Of course when it comes to course content in an OpenCourseWare, you can give away all the samples you want and you haven’t lost anything. Students will still have to pay for the degree.

This is valuable stuff. How valuable? To put things into perspective I will compare it to something much less useful: a Google Ad. Google Ads for popular university keywords range from 76 cents to $1.80. At a conservative 76 cents per click, an ad campaign for a university would cost $380,000 for 500,000 clicks. At its peak, USU OCW had an annual operating cost of $120,000 and had over 550,000 visits last year. That’s 1.5 million clicks from people interested in learning something. If you are a marketing committee, that’s worth something.

A well-developed OpenCourseWare site is valuable in so many ways. Please understand that by focusing on the marketing potential of OCW I do not mean to reduce it to merely a marketing tool. My point is that something doesn’t have to turn a profit to be sustainable. It can “earn its keep” in other ways — like marketing.

So what is your school doing with its marketing dollars? Why not create a virtual visitor’s center with OpenCourseWare? Why not give out “free samples” to thousands of prospective students? They will still come to you for the credentials. And there will be more of them.

Dear USU Board of Trustees Marketing and Public Relations Committee,

If you could build a university visitor’s center that would attract over a million different visitors in the first four years of operation — a center your could run maintain with just one or two employees that would draw thousands of learners from all over the world — If you could create such a place, how much would that be worth to you? Guess what? You already have it. It’s called USU OpenCourseWare, and it’s already paid for. So how much would you be willing to pay to keep this virtual visitor’s center working for you? Would it be worth $10,000 per month to attract 43,000 monthly visitors (not just random visitors, but people actively seeking educational content) to a USU website, ready to learn? That’s what it would cost to continue to develop USU’s OpenCourseWare site, adding new courses to the showcase each semester. Of course this site is more than a marketing effort. There is value for existing students and faculty to be able to access this course content as well — especially during Blackboard outages. OpenCourseWare courses are available without a password for anyone to use. And they are definitely being noticed. In fact, USU has an international reputation as one of the best OCWs in the world, especially for its agriculture course materials. USU OpenCourseWare is listed alongside MIT, Notre Dame, and Yale OCWs. So how do we justify paying $120,000 each year for an OpenCourseWare program? I would ask how we justify NOT paying for it.

In the past USU has advertised to random travelers in an airline magazine. Surely it must be worth more to attract an audience of learners to a USU website filled with high quality courses for them to examine. Which do you think will attract more prospective students and faculty, a site filled with course materials or an airline ad? So, now that the outside funding is gone, what is a site like USU OpenCourseWare worth in terms of marketing and PR? Is a USU site that consistently attracts 250,000 unique visitors each year worth keeping? Will USU spend its marketing budget on airline ads instead? Please support USU OpenCourseWare so it can continue to showcase content from scores of great USU courses to tens of thousands of interested visitors every month. Many of those virtual visitors will be seeking a degree sooner than you think.