So it seems like the revamped OU presence Youtube has gone live, with three channels (at the mo) and maybe another one to come if I read the greyed out Research icon right?
(Laura has the low down on the launch here: OU launch YouTube site.)
The main channel – which I guess establishes the ou view brand – appears to be home to ads and TV trails, and based on the old content that’s there is currently just a reskinning of the original OU presence on Youtube.
More exciting are the two new channels…. Firstly, OU Life, a video box for students and staff to talk about their relationship with the OU:
As well as student voices, there are some staff voices in there too…
What’s interesting about these movies is the way that secondary videos are linked to from the talking head videos – so you can easily view the videos that are being talked about as examples ‘learning content’ on Youtube. Click through on the above movie and you’ll see what I mean…
It’s interesting to note how the branding carries through to the about box on each video page… and the fluid ident at the end of each clip is really quite beautiful:-)
The second new area (again with its own colour theme) is OU Learn, a collection of movies from OU course materials.
Some of the content has been organised in playlists, which could be handy…
Again the branding carries through to the video splash page, and it’s good to see the use of course code tags that could well support some automated mashup magic somewhere down the line…;-)
One thing I can’t see offhand are license terms and conditions – is the material up for remix under a CC license or not, for example? Whatever the case, the material all seems to be embeddable:-)
For any OU staff readers interested in getting their view, or other video content, onto the OU view pages, there’s some handy advice on the intranet: Online Services Intranet > Web2.0: Youtube. (When I get back from holiday, I’ll go through the material that’s there and post what I can…)
I’m not sure about the extent to which the OU Youtube and iTunes content is either duplicated or exclusive to each site? (Or maybe content will be pushed to each site in parallel?) But there’s an info page about the iTunesU strategy on the intranet site too, so I’ll try to work out to what extent the two initiatives complement each other…
OUseful.Info, the blog... 
Thanks for the mention… was thinking we should have put up the rights info. We’ll do it when we’re recovered from the job of uploading all the videos. Some of the OpenLearn videos are CC, but most are just cleared for use on ‘social media sites’ meaning they can be embedded anywhere. iTunesU and YouTube are different in many ways, tending to attract different users and structured very differently with iTunesU being more like structured learning content and YouTube being a bit more fluid :) Having said that the people working on both projects have worked together and the aim is that we can store video, clear rights and send it off to whatever social media site it is appropriate for with a few clicks. We’ve agreed metadata standards and an interim storage and production solution that both projects share although there is a lot still to do to make this more robust. At this stage there’s a lot of cross over between the content (largely for resource reasons) but we have some videos that are exclusive to YouTube (the Galapagos stuff) and they are presented differently according to how each site delivers video. And thanks for highlighting my annotations on the blog – I sort of messed it up but I’m on my own YouTube learning curve :) We want to do a Digital Scholars series next. Anyone who is interested, get in contact.
“iTunesU and YouTube are different in many ways, tending to attract different users and structured very differently with iTunesU being more like structured learning content and YouTube being a bit more fluid :)”
But then again, you’re not the remix-consumer of these waReZ… so be wary of prejudging future usage by others…;-)