Hi
We're one of the few UK institutions involved (Edinburgh).
We were told that the Edu channel was supposed to be getting relaunched
inline with the inclusion of European institutions. It was all bit vague but
supposedly there was to be a redesign, more featured content and a
promotional push. However this hasn’t happened.
To address your questions:
1. Currently there are not really any compelling reasons to join Edu
(although why not if you're on YouTube anyway).
Education accounts in general don’t have the time length limits of general
accounts, essential for posting lectures, but this is not a feature
exclusive with Edu inclusion.
2. According to YouTube Edu T&C all your institutional content should come
under the one account and not separate devolved schools – so you’d have to
overcome this.
We decided against featuring all our content on YouTube partly for
administrative reasons. We see it more for highlights or broad outreach.
iTunesU is far better suited to high volume content as it can be presented
hierarchically and it's easier to devolve partial admin rights.
3. All institutions feature promo content. Just dont overload it. Most of
the accounts pre-date the Edu channel when there were no such restrictions.
There's been no concern expressed by YouTube over this content.
4. You wouldn’t be allowed on Edu - there's a 50 item minimum requirement.
5. YouTube doesnt consume external content such as RSS feeds. You can upload
videos - that's it. We tend to feature video news items, high profile
lectures and general promo type content.
You are correct, there's very little resource out there for YouTube and its
often out of date too. However its all quite straight forward to get up and
running. You are also allocated an account manager who you can bounce
questions off when your stuck.
My impression is that the YouTube Edu concept is a bit lightweight in
comparison to iTunesU. YouTube is a lot more accessible and hits a much
wider audience but it will never have the depth that iTunesU can have.
Despite all their ‘conditions’ of entry for the Edu channel they were pretty
relaxed when we challenged them (promo content, number of videos etc).
Hope that helps!
Cheers
Steven Ross
The University of Edinburgh
On Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:45:27 +0100, Carvalho, Jason
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Afternoon all.
>
>I don't think this has come up before, but I was wondering if anyone had
any comments or experience they'd like to share on YouTube EDU - I notice
there are seven or eight UK universities listed there so far. It doesn't
seem entirely clear to me, other than being listed in the directory of
universities, what the features and advantages of this programme offer over
a regular YouTube channel. We currently have a (non EDU) channel with a
couple of videos in it, plus our schools all have their own channels with
lots of videos listed.
>
>A few of the questions that come to mind are:
>
>1. Why sign up at all? (other than simply to take our place in a
directory)
>2. Should we be looking to accumulate all our videos from various
schools into one account? Seems like a maintenance nightmare.
>3. The T&Cs state only educational material to be uploaded, not
promotional material. This doesn't tally with what I see that's been
uploaded by other universities which are clearly promotional videos (as ours
would mostly be).
>4. Would we currently look a bit daft having a listing here with only
two videos?
>5. What else to include there - RSS of press releases, news, latest
courses etc? I have no idea if this is even possible.
>
>Information on this initiative on the YouTube site seems to be a bit thin
on the ground really.
>
>Thoughts?
>
>Jason
>-----------------------------
>Jason Carvalho
>Online Marketing Manager
>Marketing Services
>Cranfield University
>
>
>
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