This is the last post to the interactive media community blog (unless Joe decides to make some mischief, or post his own goodbye). The site is closing for two main reasons. Firstly, CEMP funding for the site has come to an end. CEMP are upgrading their systems and do not feel they can continue to support this site. The end of CEMP funding also means that I have no extra time to spend on the site. Secondly, it has become clear that a majority of students strongly prefer more traditional classroom-based teaching and learning. The courses in the Corporate and Marketing Communications Academic Group that have been based on using this site have received persistent and strong complaints from students, and only a minority of students have become active users of the site. Very few have used it beyond minimum course requirements. I find it very difficult to call for more time and more money for a project that receives such complaints, yet relatively little use. This experiment has therefore come to an end.

This site was set up as part of a CEMP project to explore the use of web technologies in teaching in higher education. We should acknowledge the work of CEMP staff (Annie, Tim and Tom) who developed the site and ensured it kept working, and also Jon and Chris who agreed to spend CEMP time and money on the project. We should also acknowledge all the work of staff and students who have posted to the site. Despite the points I made in the opening paragraph it does seem clear than some students have benefitted form the site. Log file data suggests that in a modest way, many others have got something from all the material we produced. So we can accept the ultimate ‘failure’ of the project, but still celebrate that a lot of good ideas came out of it.

The site was opened in Feb 2006 with the blog. The forum and wiki started in Oct 2006 when we really started to use it. The site has therefore been active for about 3 academic years and that means about 300 Marketing, Advertising and PR students have been directly involved with it. A few more hundred media production students have had more limited exposure to it.

I’ll summarise some data. There are over 1000 articles posted in the blog and that’s 500,000 words. There are over 5,500 comments on the blogs. There have been over 9000 file downloads (lectures and podcasts). There have been nearly 15,600 posts in the forum from about 400 active users over the three years. There are about 150 active wiki entries.

We only started monitoring the log files in October 07, so we only have 18 months of data here and this data excludes forum traffic. In that time we have had 90,000 visits with an average visit time of 6 minutes and from 40,000 unique visitors. We have had 400,000 page views.

Our idea was to create an open, collaborative online space very unlike the controlled and restricted spaces more commonly found in universities and that are often referred to as VLEs. We wanted something much more like an online community of practice; something that brought together BU staff and students and external tutors, students, practitioners and anyone else who was interested in the subject covered. We also wanted users to be able to see how the site worked and even over time take responsibility for running the site.

Elsewhere I have documented how we failed in these aims, but I don’t want to repeat details here. The project has, however told us lot about how staff and students may use (and actually also not use) online resources and this has been valuable.

Joe may yet resurrect many of the ideas explored here in a new site, and of course BU students will still have access to the university’s preferred education website, MyBU . We will also maintain this site as an archive after the summer (but I’m not sure how long the archive will remain, so if you really want any material you should save it over the next few weeks).

Thanks again everyone.

Mike

PS. I’ve started to move all my content here

http://paidia.wordpress.com/

I’ll be using that site for my teaching next year