Lessons from ABC Online
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Ian Allen is the Executive Producer of ABC Science Online. This unit produces original and innovative content for the online medium, as well as acting as the online gateway for all ABC TV and Radio science content. It accounts for around 10% of all ABC internet traffic. In 1999 ABC Science Online won both the AIMIA and AFR/Telstra internet awards for "best Australian science website". Ian was also the writer and content director for the Ingenious CD-Rom. This science/education title won the 1997 ATOM award (Australian Teachers of Media) for "Best Educational Title" and the 1998 AIMIA (Australian Interactive Multimedia Industry Association) award for "Best Game or Entertainment Title". Prior to digital media Ian was a science television producer for programs such as Quantum, A Question of Survival, and Hot Chips |
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Five years ago ABC Online did not exist. Today it is one of Australia’s most popular internet sites. Ian Allen has been involved in it since the very beginning and since 1997 has been the Executive Producer of ABC Science Online. below he talks about how the ABC made the cultural transition which enabled it to not only adapt to new media very quickly, but to make the change in a reduced-budget environment.
He also explains the reasoning behind some of ABC Science Online’s approaches to engaging and retaining online audiences. Many of these approaches are of direct relevance to online educators.
The ABC differs from educational institutions in that the goals we are trying to meet are cultural rather than curricular. In my own case, Science Online is not trying to train scientists. Instead we’re about engendering an understanding and appreciation of science – and hopefully the realisation that just as you don’t need to be a musician to enjoy music, you don’t need to be a scientist to enjoy science or to find it a very useful way to answer practical day-to-day questions. (eg will the drinks in the ice in the bath stay colder with the plug in, or the plug out)?
A
lot of the content we publish for Science Online is of direct
educational value, but we never pitch it as such. We never
say – "read this, because it will be good for you".
We’re more likely to say ‘Hey, this is really interesting"
– and hopefully, if we’ve done our job well it will be.
The ABC operates 1 TV network and 5 radio networks. This cross-media combination is a great advantage – no question. But after News, the most popular destinations on ABC Online are not websites associated with particular broadcast programs. In the case of science – the websites associated with broadcast programs account for only around 10% of the total Science Online traffic.
I suspect this is an artefact of the difference between broadcast culture and online culture. TV and radio broadcasting is by nature a one-to-many activity. It’s founded on the notion that a bunch of skilled knowledge workers can distil what it is the audience wants, and then provide it to them. It’s a kind of "we do the thinking for you" model. Yes it’s communication, but it’s mostly one-way.
(I’m sure educators may see some parallels here. Is it that much different from a bunch of skilled knowledge workers deciding what it is you need to learn and then providing a fairly rigid set of ways by which you should learn it)?
Most of the websites for ABC broadcast programs reflect that kind of thinking. You’ll find information and transcripts, but not a lot of opportunity for interactive engagement apart from email. These websites are really just supplements to their TV and Radio programs.
Cultural
changes within the ABC
Back in 1995 a lot of the motivation for setting up ABC Online was to explore alternative ways of providing information to the audience, and to a certain extent to give the audience basc-channel to the program-makers.. It was a decentralised model, with each program paying for the production of its own website. The core team of ABC Online consisted of just 3 people, and they mostly set policy guidelines about such things as branding, copyright notices, disclaimers and the like.
In 1995 Online was very much a peripheral activity. Today it is increasingly seen as the centre of the organisation. It is the "glue" that connects together everything the ABC does. That’s a pretty big cultural shift.
Because of the internet most large institutions are now at same stage of managing a similar cultural shift. The new technology affects just about everyone, in every industry. It’s a difficult transition to make, and it’s not the sort of thing that can be done top-down. Part of the success of the ABC’s transition was that the original interest and motivation came from program-makers, and they were able to act as peer evangelists, explaining the how’s and why’s to their colleagues. The ABC’s transition is not over yet, but the hardest part is now behind us.
As I mentioned, in the beginning ABC Online generated no original material itself. Everything was derivative of the broadcast programs. But as more and more broadcast programs decided to build web-sites, ABC Online ran into a navigational problem. We couldn’t fit them all on the ABC home page. So we made a new home page with separate sections for TV and Radio. This made sense to us because it reflected the way the ABC was structured. The only problem was that it didn’t make sense to our online audiences. They weren’t interested in the ABC’s divisional structure. They wanted to be able to search for content via theme. They didn’t care whether it originated from TV or Radio.
That’s
how the ABC developed the idea for its gateways. Why not make
a series of super-sites which aggregate all of the ABC’s TV
and Radio content by theme? A one stop shop where you can
connect to all of ABC Science, or all of ABC News and current
affairs. Science and News were in fact the first gateways
to be built.
It took each of these new gateways about a nanosecond before they began to generate original online material that had nothing to do with TV and Radio. In other words we began to treat the Net as a medium in its own right. Just as TV is much more than Radio with pictures, the online medium is much more than a mere extension of broadcast media.
What we set out to do with Science Online was explore the boundaries of this new medium. I don’t mean the bells and whistles technology boundaries. I mean the "how do you best employ it" boundaries. This is a lot harder to do than you might think. It’s always much easier to copy an idea than to invent a new one.
The closest historical parallel I can think of to what is happening today is the development of the cinema industry 100 years ago. Shortly after motion picture cameras were invented people began to film things like trains arriving at stations. The mere fact that you could do it was amazing. Then they explored a bit further and began to film stage plays. Then came the idea of montage and special effects and so on. It took until the early 1930’s before all of the conceptual elements of modern film-making were in place. Since then there’s really only been incremental change in the movie business. You could take a film director from 1935 and place them on a film set today and they’d have a very good idea of what was going on.
It’s not going to take 30 years for the online medium to mature. Everything is unfolding at breakneck pace. In 1995 in this country less than 1% of households had a dial-up internet connection. By May 2000 that figure was 33% – with rates of internet access from work even higher. That’s an astonishing rate of growth and it shows no signs of slowing.
Even
so, in terms of conceptual thinking, the way most organisations
are approaching the new medium hasn’t moved very far past
the point of using it as a form of traditional media. Putting
video on the net is pretty well the equivalent of using a
movie camera to film a stage play 100 years ago.
I don’t think anybody really knows where this revolution is taking us. The technology is still maturing. The big end of town hasn’t figured out the money side of things. Our law-makers are quite clue-less. Everyone knows that the status quo isn’t going to remain the same, but not what to do next.
My attitude to dealing with all of this uncertainty has been to stick to first principles. First, be very clear about defining what the business you are in is about. Second, think about the things that set the Internet apart from other forms of communication and how you might apply those differences to do what you do now better.
For the purposes of this discussion three big differences jump out immediately.
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Distance doesn’t matter.
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Unlike broadcast media, Online content need not be ephemeral.
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It is a true two-way medium.
When we set up Science Online one of the first things we did was to look for some form of content which could exploit all three of these factors at once. We came up with "Ingrid on Ice". This was an online photo-diary of a wintering Antarctic expeditioner, written and published as the year unfolded. It also had a guestbook where interested people could post and read comments.
"Ingrid on Ice" turned out to be quite a big hit. A lot more people are interested in Antarctica than you might think. Over the eight months it attracted just under a megabyte of entries in the guestbook – these came from people of all walks of life from all over the world.
"Ingrid on Ice" was a very new type of content for the ABC. It was unusual in that the ABC had very little to do creating it. The content originated from Ingrid and her audience. The ABC’s role was really more that of an enabler. We’d created a space on the internet and invited people to come and share it. True, the ABC’s imprimatur helped give the space credibility with Australian audiences, but that didn’t explain the international visitors.
This idea of "enabling" discussion space is now a regular part of the activities of Science Online. We do it whenever we come across a topic which merits extended discussion. Sometimes these are follow-ups to a TV or Radio program, sometimes as follow-ups to a public event of significance. For example, after last year’s Consensus Conference we held an extended discussion on genetically modified food.
Engaging
and retaining online audiences
There’s no question that the ABC’s TV and radio networks have been of enormous help in raising the profile of ABC Online. ABC Radio has been a particularly big help because you hear the URLs for particular programs read out all the time. But it’s one thing to attract a visitor, and quite another to have them return again and again. On the internet there is no such thing as a "captive" audience.
Science Online is regarded as one of the ABC’s stickier sites. There’s a combination of factors behind that.
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Probably the most important one is our attitude. We treat our audience with great respect. All email enquiries for example, are handled by either myself or my 2IC, not someone junior. We treat the fact that someone has taken the time to write to us a compliment, even if they are sometimes critical. We learn a lot from email.
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We also monitor all of our online forums and email discussion lists and try to participate in them whenever we can. We think of our audience as partners and colleagues. In fact we sometimes ask them about the best ways to solve particular problems. Some of our most elegant solutions have come from the audience. Also, we often find totally fascinating discussions going on in our forums and email lists. Sometimes we ask for permission to publish this material on line as a feature. Memoirs of a Space Engineer is one such example.
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We try to maintain a cycle of regular stimulation. We like to have something new every day, every week, every fortnight and every month. We send out an email alert once each week. In the email all of the new content has clickable links so people can go directly to the item rather than wade their way down to it from the home page.
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We test everything under dial-up conditions. It is so very easy to forget that the computers at the office are connected to very high-bandwidth pipes. It can be quite a different experience to view the same page from the end of a crappy phone line.
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We never "build and forget". We regularly check the older parts of our site looking for bits which no longer work, or have out of date URLs. People will tolerate the odd broken bit, but if it happens too often it reflects a lack of respect for your visitors.
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Finally, we think of ourselves as only a part of the greater cultural activity called "science". We are always very open to collaborative activities with other science institutions. You are probably aware of National Science Week, but you may not know that we are engaged with Birds Australia in the Bird Atlas project, or that we host a free Science Events Diary where anyone can post details of an event.
Maintaining
Online Personalities
Dr Karl is undoubtedly the biggest personality within Science online. He publishes one new ‘Great Moments in Science" each week, as well as doing a cross-media radio-web talkback show.
However the most successful part of the Dr Karl web site is nothing to do with any of that. It’s an online forum called "Self Service Science". The interesting thing is that Dr Karl hardly every visits it, so why has it become such a popular place?
I think it’s due to a combination of factors, but probably the most important one is that the idea and philosophy of the forum actually sits very well with one of the revolutionary aspects of the digital environment. And that is that we are witnessing a decentralisation of power and access to knowledge.
Dr Karl may be amazingly knowledgable, but he never pretends to know everything. Instead he’s characterised by a spirit of curious enquiry. So what’s actually happened with Self Service Science is that it’s become a space on the net where that spirit of enquiry is welcomed. Because of that it’s attracted an eclectic collection of people, a great number of them experts in one field or another, and together they share what they know with each other as well as with the non-experts. It’s grown to become its own little cyber community. And it’s fun.
I can see some of the same principles directly applying to teaching. The days where the teacher had to pretend to be the gatekeeper to knowledge are now well and truly over. There’s so much information online that it’s futile to pretend otherwise. Now it’s much more productive to think of the role as more like that of a guide or mentor – to help set up the tone and the spirit and the standards which people can apply when seeking out knowledge. In this new environment education is really a partnership relationship between the teacher and the student.
One big advantage that distance education services enjoy is that the people who’ve enrolled are clearly motivated. They’ve signed up because they want to learn something and they’re prepared to make an effort. Media organisations never enjoy that kind of audience commitment.
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Trends and observations about where we are going
I don’t know how many of you saw Kerry Packer when he appeared before a senate enquiry a few years ago. I think it was to do with media convergence. They asked him about what it all means and he replied "It’ll cut out the middleman". I’m no fan of Kerry, but that’s a very succinct summary of where we are going.
Every business which is based upon some form of monopoly control of access to information is going to have to re-invent itself over the next decade. The balance of power of power is shifting massively in favour of the consumer. I happen to think this will be a very good thing, a very democratic thing. I don’t expect the transition will be without pain, but quite a lot of that pain is going to deservedly be felt in places that have had a free ride for far too long. For example, the days when owning a television station was a license to print money are coming to an end. I don’t think this is a bad thing.
For people involved in education, I see great opportunities as well as great challenges. I don’t believe there’s been so much public concern about education since the days of the Space Race in the 1960’s. The 50c dollar means even Blind Freddy can see that there’s no future for a nation which doesn’t invest in developing skilled human capital.
It’s great that Australia is already well advanced in its thinking about distance education. Distance has always been our enemy.
(When I worked in the film industry in the 1980’s we were always about 18 months behind the rest of the world in terms of our access to new ideas and equipment. Today I work in the online world and we have exactly the same access to ideas and technology as anyone else in the developed world. Distance isn’t a handicap anymore. In fact the time-zone difference can actually be an advantage).
The main challenge is going to be truly global competition. Why should a distance education student choose to take a course from Monash when they could just as easily take one from Harvard?
I think the answers to that will be to do with quality and cost and institutional expertise and innovation.
That’s the approach we are taking at ABC Online.
Thankyou.
Some references
Australian Bureau of Statistics
Last updated: 25 October 2000
The
NET*Working 2000 is an online professional development initiative within
the Framework for National Collaboration in Flexible Learning in VET 2000-2004