Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Presenting at the DIT e-Learning Summer School #elss13 @YouTube #analytics

Today I had the pleasure of speaking to people attending the annual Summer School on e-Learning at DIT Aungier St. The topic for my talk was "Learning analytics and YouTube: What to watch and who to follow", and I shared my own experiences and learning analytics from my YouTube Channel. 

Getting ready.
Photo by @IClaudiad.
I discussed YouTube EDU and what I use my channel for. I also covered the motivation for using YouTube and how Google are making inroads into the managed on-line course space to challenge the likes of Coursera and Edx. I encouraged the audience to investigate some of the fantastic content (I used Prof Michael Sandel's super "Justice" course as an example).

I then moved on to the analytics provided by Google for my channel. I spent a good bit of time showing the cycles that views go through over the lifetime of the channel and talked a bit about audience retention. I then concentrated on the last 365 days showing weekly cycles and where the best and worst times of the year are for the number of views. I also showed a map of the world and the number of views from different countries. We had some discussion on the gender breakdown by country, the traffic sources, and the types of device that viewers are watching my videos from. The next set of analytics was about the demographics, and my audience were interested to find out that the highest proportion of viewers were middle aged American men! I also covered engagement reports (likes, dislikes, shares, etc) and briefly mentioned comments and the email traffic that I get from the channel. The last part of my talk was about Earnings - people were fascinated that such a simple channel can earn some money. I'm sure that many will be motivated to go down the same path.

@topgold getting ready for #elss13
After coffee I attended a talk on Reflective Audio Journaling by Bernie Goldbach (@topgold) of Limerick IT. As always, Bernie was very informative and entertaining. He showed the power of using audio with a simple tool called Audioboo and how it can capture the voices of students for reflective learning. He also demonstrated how easy Audioboo is to use and also how it can help people who are visually impaired. This was shown to us by Nadine who is visually impaired and made her first Boo on her iPhone only minutes after downloading it from the App Store. Bernie also played some examples of how other people use podcasting for capturing all sorts of sounds - these ranged from birds singing to a bus driver capturing kids' voices.

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