How do you measure the “value” and “impact” of a face-to-face conference you attend? Most likely, these benefits are measured differently by different folks. In the case of a virtual and free online conference like K-12 Online, it’s likely some of those “metrics of value” may be different than they are for face-to-face conferences. While we can count number of attendees in a face-to-face conference session, we can count the number of video views for an online conference. While those numbers don’t tell us how many people stayed for an entire session or watched an entire video, nor do they tell us how many people “did something different” or even “had their teaching practice transformed” by things they learned in a particular session, these numbers can provide a little insight into the impact of different events on attendees / participants.
Since K12 Online Conference videos are shared both on Blip.tv as well as iTunesU, the statistics provided by Blip alone are not comprehensive for the number of video views per day, week, or month for our conference. They do provide a partial picture, however, of how many people are viewing videos from our conference. Based on a Blip.tv report inclusive of video views from October 1, 2012 through January 14, 2013:
- Our videos (hosted by Blip) were watched 10,143 times in all
- Our videos (hosted by Blip) were watched an average of 100 times per day (98.48 times per day, to be more exact)
These statistics are available as a shared Google Spreadsheet, if you’d like to look at them in more detail.
In addition to these view statistics, it’s interesting to note how video views peaked during the actual weeks of the conference but have remained fairly steady (although lower in quantity) since then.
It’s also interesting to see what the “top referrers” are to our Blip videos. Clearly, some professors at Indiana University are using K-12 Online videos with students! Chris Betcher is also a major referrer!
The number for iTunes does NOT include or refer to video views in our iTunesU channel. We’ll see if we can obtain some statistics for those video downloads, and share those as well.
What do you make of these statistics? Are they lower or higher than you’d expect? It seemed we had far FEWER comments on presentation videos in 2012. These view statistics are actually higher than I’d expected, so I’m pleasantly surprised. What’s your take?