The Open University (OU) uses broadcast to deliver teaching materials to students through partnership agreements with the BBC. The BBC allocates specific time slots for OU programmes on BBC2 TV and Radio 4. Broadcasting has created a large non-student audience and greatly increased the OU's PR in the UK. The Open University Business School (OUBS) produces audio, video and CD-ROM products for use in its own teaching distance programmes.

OUBS wishes to extend and enhance its reputation based on its research and teaching strengths and provider of innovative approaches to management learning. Also to develop understanding of the markets for broadcast projects for wider business audiences and exlore models of integration with other new media.

The Business Café project was the first major experiment within this process of development. The Business Café combined synchronous broadcasting on regular terrestrial TV with an advanced Web site.

2. The Innovative Nature of the Project

The project applied the concept of integrated broadcasting. The idea behind this is that TV viewers are drawn to the Web Site and the Web Site adds value to their viewing by offering further knowledge and enabling discussion.

The opportunity arose for OUBS to create a series of magazine style television programmes for network broadcast, linked to an advanced open-to-all Web Site. The target audience was managers and small businesses as well as the large OUBS distant community of Associate Lecturers, students, clients, partners and alumni.

3. The Business Café Television Programmes

The Business Café set was created high in Tower 42, with views over the City of London. The programmes were broadcast from 21st February 1999 on a weekly basis, except for Easter Sunday, with the last programme on 25th April 1999. They were on BBC2 from 7.45 am to 8.15 am.

Winifred Robinson presented the programmes. Participants in the Café discussions were management academics (many from OUBS), businesses professionals and commentators. Each of the 9 programmes included a main feature (based on OUBS research expertise) and a series of regular weekly items. The feature was introduced through brief discussion in the Café and explored through filmed "case study" style reports. Regular short items included a "taxi ride" with a business figure in the news and an "office of my own", giving a tour and explanation of how organisations and individuals are using their office space. Each programme discussed a business book and finished with a stock market commentary.

The URL for the Web Site was regularly shown on screen, together with invitations from the Presenter to log-on and take part. She also gave a brief report on camera about the contributions to The Business Café online discussion forum during the previous week.

The main features were:

• Week 1 - E-commerce
• Week 2 - Intellectual Capital
• Week 3 - Social Entrepreneurship.
• Week 4 - Innovation.
• Week 5 - Knowledge Management.
• Week 6 - Family Values (in business)
• Week 7 - Regeneration.
• Week 8 - Risk.
• Week 9 - 21st Century Manager.

4. Television Viewers

Up to 8% of the total audiences (terrestrial, cable and satellite) was achieved at 8 am on Sunday mornings (300,000 live viewers) for each of 9 weekly broadcasts. A further audience occurred later as the programme was videorecorded (but no data available). The audience was of the kind we had planned to attract- i.e. 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 aware that OUBS offered management education and were interested in OUBS courses, which was a satisfactory marketing outcome.

5. The Business Café Web Site

Throughout the television broadcasts, the Presenter referred to The Business Café Web Site. We created a fresh new Site and discussions week on week for 9 consecutive weeks. Each new Web Site focussed on the features in each TV programme.

The Business Café Web Site included:

• This week's feature streamed onto the Site through video
• Video streaming of the book review shown on the programme that week
• Computer mediated discussion area (using open access Web version of FirstClass)
• "Business briefing" -downloadable specially produced article for each feature
• Web links- special collections of relevant Web Sites to illustrate the main feature of the programme
• Tell us about yourself - our opportunity to collect feedback on viewers and visitors to the Site
• Previous week's series/sites
• Credits
• Links to the main OU and OUBS Sites
• Link to OUBS brochure request
• Link to main BBC Site
• Link to Amazon for book ordering
• Link to the Microsoft MediaPlayer Site for video player download
• Copyright statement

6. Web Site Visitors

Following the first week's TV programme, there were 4,000 visitors to The Business Café Web Site. This rose to just around 6,000 per week throughout the 9 weeks, except for weeks 7 to 8 when it reached 8,000 per week. Around 42% of the visitors to the Web Site logged on during the day of the TV broadcast in the morning (i.e. Sundays), with the remainder during the following week. Around two thirds of the Web visitors were prompted by the TV programmes and the rest found The Business Café Site through other sites on the Web or by recommendation. Visitors logged in from all over the world (outside the TV range), watched the video clips and contributed to the online discussion.

7. Evaluation by Stakeholders

Evaluation of the TV programmes reported success for the filmed case studies, the imaginative filming, the lively, interesting format, the presenter, the topical issues and the weekly "market" commentary. Less well received were the scheduling slot (Sunday mornings), some of the book reviews, office of my own and taxi rides (it was demanding to provide 9 very high quality and consistent topics of each kind). The main improvements needed were far greater "depth" of treatment of some issues, and more consistent and effective enticement to visit The Business Café Web Site.

On the Web site, successful aspects were the Business Briefing (downloadable specially written papers), the technical provision of the discussion forum, the skill of the moderating team, the online questionnaires and the specially presented "Web links". Improvements suggested were to simplifying the look, feel and navigation and shorten the video clip download time.

8. Lessons from The Business Café Experience

An online and integrated community did not build from the Project as we had hoped. It was difficult to ensure a focussed message about the benefits of the Web site through the TV programmes. Each week's online discussion forum attracted a new cohort of participants, usually those who were interested in that week's feature. The best interest, quantity and depth of discussion occurred where an issue was controversial and especially where Web visitors disagreed with a view in the TV programme. To create a community, it is likely that the TV series would need to build up more directly from week to week, more like a serial than a series, and the Web activities would need to be more purposeful and valuable to a cohort of participants.

The BBC production team's schedules were professional, creative but extremely pressurised. The OUBS The Business Café project team was experienced and well set up technically to produce the Web Site. In practice each team focussed on its own specialism. This resulted in satisfactory quality but rather less integration between the two media than we desired.

9. Reflections on The Business Café Experience

Technological convergence of broadcasting and telecommunications has been happening for some time 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.

Television shows are made to be visual, dynamic and stimulating. For educational purposes add to this, a proliferation of academics, each expert in their own field and used to producing distance learning materials, typically in print. Then add the quite different behaviours and need of Web users compared to TV viewers and the technical demands of producing easy to use and navigate Web pages! You can start to see the challenge!

Gilly Salmon August 99