| The Business Café Project | ||||||||
| Dr. Gilly Salmon, Open University Business School gks13@leicester.ac.uk Presented to Fifth Inernational Conference on Asynchronous Learning Networks, University of Maryland, USA Abstract This paper describes and discusses critically a unique experiment in using a combination of broadcast television and an interactive Web site to reach people interested in business and management. The project, called The Business Café, was mounted by the Open University's Business School in collaboration with the BBC. The paper outlines the contents of the nine shows and the site, which changed weekly. Developing the shows and maintaining the site required complex procedures and teamwork. The shows attracted an audience of 300,000 UK viewers and the site recorded over 60,000 visitors during the series. The stakeholders and others, who offered much constructive criticism, revealed more project outcomes during an evaluation. Useful lessons emerged, in particular about cross-team working and about learning from asynchronous networks like the Web. 1. Why have a Business Café? Six months ago, the Open University's project, The Business Café, was in full swing. I'm fairly certain it was the first attempt by a large European business school to combine synchronous broadcast television with asynchronous networking over the Internet. I was Project Director and Series Consultant and I'd like to tell you what happened during this exciting venture. But first let me give you some background. After all, why have a Business Cafe? The Open University (commonly known as the OU) has a Business School that teaches 25,000 students at a distance in European and other countries. Many of its high quality courses include online components, as well as print materials, broadcasting (through the BBC) and face-to-face seminars. But, as must be the case here in the United States, the School's OU's environment is rapidly changing. Two examples: first, students' access to online educational resources is increasing as telecommunication links improve. Second, television networks, including the BBC, face stiff competition from other providers of information, entertainment and education. In the Business School, where we are very aware of such changes, we noticed opportunities for linking the BBC's broadcasting to interactive Web Sites for distance learning. The Business Café was our first project in this field. I'm sure that here in the States, partnerships are seen as a key to success for educational institutions. Since 1969, the OU has commissioned the BBC to make and broadcast its television and radio. This broadcasting on national channels, that are also available on cable in Continental Europe, has created a large non-student audience and greatly raised the OU's profile among the general public. Through the OU-BBC partnership, the OU is now being seen as a distinctive educational broadcaster meeting the needs of a wide audience, well beyond its own students. Instead of all the BBC's television and radio for the OU being tied closely to courses for OU students, as they used to be, some series are now aimed at wider audiences too. Inside the OU, the Business School has to bid for broadcast slots. It must have a clear idea of what it wants, based on an understanding of its various audiences. The School set aside resources for several projects during 1999 to provide data for strategic decisions about future broadcasts. The Business Café was the first, and I shall explain now how it was conceptualized. 2. The Business Café Concept The opportunity arose for the Business School to create with the BBC a series of magazine-style business television broadcasts - I think you would call them 'shows' - linked to an advanced interactive Web site. This concept was labelled 'integrated broadcasting', the idea being that television viewers would be drawn to the Web site, and the Web site would add value to their viewing of the broadcasts by offering further knowledge and a chance to collaborate with other viewers. The School saw the series as likely to enhance its teaching and research reputation. The makers of The Business Café set out to showcase the School's expertise in specific management areas: our faculty members were responsible for the content and the BBC focused on creating engaging and informative television. Both the BBC and the School planned to digitize and index everything made for the series, so that it could be cannibalized for other purposes afterwards. The School wanted to reach hundreds of thousands of British and Continental European public and private sector managers interested in "business" and "management", plus the School's 30,000-strong community of students, alumni, tutors (you would probably call them mentors), clients and partners. By the way, I must tell you that this project was developed in a rapidly changing organisational climate, during huge changes in staffing at the BBC Production Centre on our campus at Milton Keynes. In fact, a great deal was innovative about this project, as you will see. Although the School and the BBC are very successful at producing high quality television and video series - and interactive CD-ROMs - for management courses taught at a distance, the partnership had never produced television shows for a general business audience. In addition, although the School was used to providing online conferencing facilities for social and learning purposes within the 6,000 strong MBA student community, we had not tried out an open-to-anyone discussion Web site. Publicity for the series was put in the hands of the School's new PR agency, Grayling. We knew that the Web site could probably provide data on its visitors - and feedback on the project. But let me tell you something about the shows (broadcasts, as the BBC would say). 3. The Shows The Business Café set was created in an office high in Tower 42, overlooking the City of London. The series of nine shows was broadcast on a national network on Sunday mornings, 7.45 to 8.15 am, during last February, March and April. Each show was presented by Winifred Robinson, normally a business presenter on radio. Each included a main feature plus regular short items. The nine main features, chosen to match the School's research expertise, were: e-commerce, intellectual capital, social entrepreneurship, innovation, knowledge management, family values in business, risk and the twenty-first century manager. Each week the feature was introduced through brief discussion in the Café between Winifred Robinson, a faculty member from the School, and another outside expert, then explored further through filmed "case study" style reports. Afterwards, back in the Café, academics and other professionals discussed issues in the feature. The regular short items included a weekly taxi ride during which a business figure in the news was asked to describe his or her most important decision whilst riding through London in a black cab. Another short item was an "office of my own": viewers were taken on a quick tour of an office, where they saw how different organisations and individuals are using their office space. In each show Winifred Robinson discussed briefly with a reviewer a recent book on management. Finally, she ended the show by asking one of the School's best-known professors about what had happened that week on the London Stock Exchange - and what might happen next! To promote the Web site, the URL was regularly shown on screen. Winifred Robinson also invited viewers to take part by visiting the site, and she summarized interesting messages received during the previous week. 4. The Web Site This is what the Web site looked like at the start. Let me point out what's what.
USWeb/CKS, the School's technology partner, created and maintained the Web site. As the series ran over 9 weeks the site could be easily modified, within a template, to reflect the content of each show. Like the School's Web site, it also had to be highly accessible and usable from all computer platforms. 5. Maintaining the Web Site The Business Café was hosted on the School's server, on campus in Milton Keynes. You may be interested in the procedures we followed to maintain the Web site. Each week, at 5.00pm on the Friday before the Sunday show, a new version of the site went "live". The project team set up interlocking systems to create, move, check, and hand over material on time. We had to pass seven components to USWeb/CKS: 5.1 Video for the site 5.2 Business Briefing An OU Business School faculty member wrote a 2000-word article about the week's feature. An OU editor checked it for consistency and style, then sent amendments back for clearance prior to it being emailed to USWeb/CKS for publishing on the Web in HTML. 5.3 Web links Two Business School tutors were contracted to contact the lead academic for each week's feature and obtain the key words to be used when searching for appropriate Web sites. They then sent to the academic the results of their searches with comments about suggested sites. After checking, further discussion and searching, an agreed list was sent to USWeb/CKS to be published. The OU Library also contributed URLs , e-journals, and subscription listings for incorporation. 5.4 Conferencing area Created and managed by the OU's Academic Computing Service, this area had an open Web-based FirstClass environment that let users send messages through their own email system to the conference that they decided to join. ACS required three days' notice to create the new conferences for the following week . The nine e-moderators, who lived all over the UK, were chosen for their experience in using FirstClass. They had a 3-hour face-to-face briefing but all further resources and support were provided through the conferencing medium. A "private conference" area for e-moderators proved absolutely essential for development of ideas and problem solving. They worked in two teams ensuring coverage 24 hours a day throughout the period for open conferencing. The e-moderators had a prior view of each week's show on video. They took it in turns to provide a welcome message to the new topics in each week's online discussion forum, guided by me. I received feedback from the e-moderators about key discussion points and the participants, and the School's Webmaster told me about activity on the site. I built this information into two or three paragraphs of copy and sent them to the BBC production team each Thursday evening. Winifred Robinson then used them to record on Friday a report about the week's Web activity as a short item in the show each Sunday. 5.5 Tell us about yourself This was a Web-based questionnaire designed by the School and the OU's Institute of Educational Technology . It asked questions about the background and interests of visitors to the Web site, and it proved to be a successful, low-cost way of obtaining a quick impression of the visitors. 5.6 Book ordering Each week a link was created to the Amazon site associated with the book reviewed on the show, enabling visitors to the Web site to order the book easily, and at the same to demonstrate a benefit of such Web links. 5.7 Special questionnaire This questionnaire was designed to accompany the feature on risk. It enabled visitors to assess their own risk-taking capabilities. After completing the questionnaire, respondents got immediate feedback on a numeric scale with an explanation. As the data is anonymous it is being used by the School's research team on risk 6. Project Outcomes 6.1 Television audience Let's look first at the television audience. The Business Café broadcasts drew as many as 300,000 viewers, or eight percent of the total UK television audience (terrestrial, cable and satellite) at 8 am on Sundays. As we know that some people videorecorded the shows to watch later, this is an under-estimate of the final viewer total. The BBC considers this percentage to be high for a business show early on a Sunday morning. The largest audience share was achieved when there had been targeted publicity beforehand (Show 6). From the questionnaire responses on the Web site, we know that the audience was the kind we had planned to attract - middle or senior managers or small business owners. They represented almost every industrial sector and type of managerial job and were typically 35-54 years old. Around half were not previously aware that the Business School offered management education and around half said they were interested in OU courses: that was for us a satisfactory marketing outcome. 6.2 Web Site Visitors Now what about the Web site? Following the first week's show, there were around 4,000 visitors to The Business Café Web site. This rose to around 6,000 for weeks 2-6 reached to 8,000 for show 7 and fell again to 6,000 for weeks 8-9. In total, around 60,000 visits were made to the Café home page during the series. Around 42 percent of the visitors logged on during the morning of the broadcast (i.e. Sunday). The rest seemed to wait until they arrived at work during the week. The peak times were between 8.15 am - as the show finished - until around 4 p.m., when log-on numbers reduced. Visitors spent on average just over 4 minutes on the site in the first few weeks, and this dropped steadily to around 3 minutes by the end of the series. Probably familiarity with the navigation meant less time was needed on the site after several visits. Only a small proportion of the TV audience logged onto the site. Around two-thirds of the visitors were prompted by the TV shows and the rest found The Business Café site through other sites on the Web or by recommendation. Around half of the visitors to the site belonged to the School's own remote community, mainly MBA students and their tutors. Some of these were unable to watch the live shows because they were outside the broadcast range and several commented on the benefits of video streaming in English. A few suggested that The Business Café should be broadcast on BBC World, the BBC's equivalent of CNN. Other international visitors logged in and watched the video clips and contributed to the online discussion. There was a small increase in visitors to the School's general information site from The Business Café site, especially on Sunday after the show. Around one-third of the visitors to the School's site, clicked through to The Business Café site - some interest continues even now, six months later. The most popular attractions for our site visitors were the selected URLs associated with each week's feature. Typically, one-quarter of them explored these URLs. The most popular links were to sites related to our features on knowledge management, family values and the twenty-first century manager. The most time (on average, 7 minutes) spent per visit on any one activity was on the 'Illusion of Control' questionnaire associated with the show on risk. We found that Web visitors spent around 3 minutes on completing the "Tell Us About Yourself" questionnaire. The most popular "Business Briefing" article that was downloaded was associated with the show on knowledge management. 7. Evaluation by the Project Team and Stakeholders I think you'll be interested to know what we discovered when we ran a Aface-to-face focus group was run on the Monday afterfollowing the last TV broadcast, with . Rrepresentatives of all the main teams involved in the project attended. We also asked In addition,the nine Web discussion forum e-moderators similar questions were asked online, and integrated the Thedata from both sources in a couple of charts, which I'd like to show you. collected was integrated What worked well in the shows?
Improvements to the Shows for Next Time
WEBSITWhat worked well on the Web site
Improvements needed to the Web site
8. Lessons from the Project 8.1 Cross-Team Working Although the BBC had originally been extremely enthusiastic about the integrated Web site, in practice the BBC production team had very little time to take an interest as schedules became extremely pressurised, as first transmissions grew closer. The School's project team for The Business Café was experienced and well set up technically to produce the Web site and this proved no problem. Each team, then, focused on its own specialism. This resulted in satisfactory quality but rather less integration than was planned. It also led to constant requests from the School's team for more "mentions" of the Web site and more integration of it into the TV shows, sometimes at the eleventh hour. By about Show 6, some felt that "overkill" on mentioning the Web Site had been reached! Over 20 faculty members from the Business School were involved. They played their part in defining, suggesting formats and case studies, presenting topics on screen and discussing aspects of the features in the Café. All had demanding schedules, already full of teaching and research. In fact, they were a constant source of frustration to the busy BBC producers. They tried to make themselves available but rarely when they were needed for recording, since the broadcasters operated on very short, tight time schedules, while the academics' diaries were filled for months ahead. There was then an inherent paradox - academics needed to be more involved throughout for a better product and to gain more respectful and effective understanding from the broadcasters, while the broadcasters needed responsive, fast, focused support from the academics, whom they saw as "topic and content providers". This paradox might be resolved with rather less of a magazine format for the shows, and a shorter series, dealing with topics and features in more depth. The shows could then involve far fewer academics. More focused and feasible working relationships between the teams should then result. Television producing teams, Web designers, development, build and maintenance teams and those faculty providing meaningful context, content and methodology for educational purposes, will come together more often in the future. In this project, effective collaboration and flexible problem-solving attitudes, absolutely essential for complex multimedia projects, were achieved within and across several teams. The Web team included Business School tutors (working remotely as e-moderators and Web resource finders), USWeb/CKS, the OU's own design editors, the OU's own publicity group and OUBS's PR agency (Graylings), all achieved effective processes and outcomes. The OU's Academic Computing Services, with experience of large-scale conferencing, were keen to try out new versions of conferencing software in innovative ways, and succeeded in supporting the project. In each of these teams, there were either well-established relationships. Sometimes only one or two individuals were involved. Many relevant and interesting views on the TV shows were expressed by members of the School's own community, particularly current students and their tutors and recent MBA alumni and tutors. They particularly noted some trivialisation of topics, the unsuitable way the Web site was introduced on the show, and their dislike of the music used. Had their views on these topics and others been taken into account during the envisioning and production of the shows, the School would doubtless have been much more satisfied with the outcome and the series would have attracted a larger section of the target audience. However, it is difficult to see how this kind of constant feedback and feed forward into every aspect of the television programming could have been undertaken in view of the very short lead-in time and the professionalism of the BBC production team. It comes back again to a need for more cross-team working and more responsiveness across the professional roles. Television shows are made to be visual, dynamic, appropriate, and stimulating. That is challenge enough. Each series develops its sense of audience, its norms and mores - and its teams and their roles pan out differently. Add a proliferation of academics, each one expert in his or her own field and used to producing distance learning materials, usually in print, and inevitably gulfs in understanding will develop. In this project, when each team found itself responsible for one particular task or outcome, e.g. editing for sound quality, designing the Web Site, there was little difficulty. When it was important that individuals or teams truly collaborated, however, there was little meeting of minds. Despite constant individual efforts, stakeholders remained somewhat uncomfortable with working relationships throughout, especially those between the BBC's production team and the School's academic team. We might all have had very closely designated roles and responsibilities, and built up cross-team trust from the start. However, this was a completely new project, staffed largely with people who had not chosen to work together and who had absolutely no time to go through the niceties of gradually understanding each other. When large teams are involved in a complex and time-dependent project like this one, structured methodologies are needed, wherever time allows. 8.2 Lessons for Asynchronous Learning Networks We had expected that the weekly series of nine television shows, and a Web site refreshed weekly would build commitment from viewers and Web site visitors. In particular, we wanted to build gradually a "The Business Café online community " and hoped to improve slowly the quality of discussion in the asynchronous conferences. None of this really happened. We found it extremely difficult to ensure that a clear and focused message was broadcast about the site's location, what it offered and how viewers could find it and join the discussions. Visitors to the Web site seemed willing to fill in questionnaires, follow Web links, and download and print "business briefings". Therefore we conclude that when participants look casually at the television shows and the Web site, they are more likely to fill in easy questionnaires and download printable resources than take part in online discussion. The size of audience fluctuated slightly from week to week but did not build up. Although there was a slight upward trend in visitors to the Web site during the series, each week's online conference attracted a small new cohort of participants, usually those who were interested in that week's feature. The best online discussion, in terms of quantity and depth, occurred when an issue was controversial and especially when conference participants disagreed with the presenter or reviewer's views stated in the show. To build a community, probably the series should build up from week to week, more like a serial than a series, and the Web activities should be more purposeful and obviously valuable to participants. Conclusion Technological convergence of broadcasting and telecommunications has been happening for some years now. Using broadcasting in parallel with the Web surely makes sense, particularly for education. My experience in this project makes me believe it is worthwhile, but not easy. The Business Café project taught us quite a few lessons about how the two media inter-relate. We shall be applying these lessons in future projects. Acknowledgements Many thanks to Robin Stenham, OU Business School Project Officer and Project Manager for The Business Café, and to Professor David Hawkridge of the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University for their input to and comments on this paper. Dr Gilly Salmon is Director of Presentation for the Open University's Business School, and was the School's lead faculty member for this project. She has taught via and moderated computer conferencing for the past 10 years and has participated in the production of BBC television shows for the School. |
