2022-05-04 Marketing WG

Conference Recap

@Eden Huthmacher
@Esteban Etcheverry
@Stefania Trabucchi
Patrick Neubert

• Esteban mentioned that having new participants from new perspectives provided the marketing working group with novel insights and new ideas. This should be continued into the future. i.e. inviting people from new perspectives to join in the conversation regularly.

• Stefania mentioned that we have a good system (Open edX) behind us and we should point out clearly all the good points of the system. This includes making clear the current major transition between edX/2U/TCRIL/community and the important role of the Core Contributors during this transition. This is the moment to use this group to have a clear position about what we have, because it's really a great product.

• Patrick mentioned that we have many service providers in the working group, but we need to get more end users involved, sharing their stories about how they use Open edX. It’s more inspiring to hear stories about users that have no commercial interest. How can we talk to end users and let them know we need their input to put out a better version each time we upgrade? See next item for an example.

”Webinars”

@Eden Huthmacher

@Stefania Trabucchi

• The public facing webinars have been running on a quarterly basis, but now we are going to run them on a monthly cadence instead, in order to get more visibility. Please message Eden on the marketing slack to feature a use case. Use cases can be myriad, for example from service providers, individual users, organisations, etc, in order to cover more use cases.

• There is an upcoming session from Readspeaker in July and also a session from Curricume coming up.

• Ned mentioned that the use of the word Webinar usually means just sitting and listening, but hopes for a more interactive format such as Gather (the community already has a Gather account that featured at the 2019 conference). Eden highlighted that we can discuss format in our Friday event planning meeting.

Notes from the conference group workshop on 29.04.2022

• Link to workshop document:

  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vOpB0VBajPjaNxYBYRY1mqopxD1kV10ryehNstH52k0/edit?usp=sharing
  
  

  Mainly there was a focus around two topics: (1) https://sandboxopenedx.edunext.io/ and the (2) Open edX website.

• (1) Sandbox:
  - We need to review the text across the entire site, with special mention of the Get Started page because the message should reach out to a big group of decision makers, human resources, corporate, schools, governments, and other sectors.
  - We should divide the work up into smaller groups to analyse the different pages or courses to see how we need to improve it. We could set a 2-week period to fix anything.
  - Highlighting the benefits of Open edX that fit specific use cases would be helpful, for example the time-to-market is very quick with this powerful platform and there is a lot of functionality in place. Other example benefits is that it’s open source. These benefits could be mapped to a particular use case or “user type”.
  - We need to link the Sandbox to the main Open edX website and visa versa (when the Sandbox is ready)
  - Do we have a cookies policy and other legal issues resolved/enabled yet?
  - Can we get users to rate the Sandbox experience? We might use a Google form for getting feedback at the end of courses, as well as a survey (we could use the built-in Open edX survey tool ).
  - We might need four courses to explain things from different use cases.
  - Eden mentioned that there are 90 providers in the marketplace, which could all link to the Sandbox. We may resultantly need to remove eduNEXT branding from the Sandbox but mention them as the sponsor on the Open edX website itself before people go through to the Sandbox. Ana will provide an update after speaking with Juan about this.
  - Stefania has created a Trello card for the Sandbox. We will tag Juan and Ana to the card so everyone can give their feedback to them: https://trello.com/c/tQZBXOIP/148-open-edx-sandbox
  
  

• (2) Open edX Website:
  - We should advertise by audience type to help newcomers make more sense of the platform.
  - Stefania mentioned that we should promote the Open edX product with a clear offer that is easy to use and understand.
  - The site is being developed with help from Edly and managed by Eden.
  - You can submit your ideas or proposals for the upgrading of the Open edX website to the backlog on the Trello card here: https://trello.com/b/6zTkhNlD/open-edx-website
  - New upcoming blogs include a story about Racoongang that was presented as a keynote at the conference. They are supporting secondary schools in Ukraine with online learning opportunities by using Open edX. This could be a model that can be adopted for other countries too. There is a blog post proposal here:
  - IBL has offered to facilitate professional video development with their studio in New York or their mobile unit that can go to Boston if need be.
  - Generally speaking, the new narrative for the Open edX website is that it should be more inclusive for different user types. For example, user types might include:

  • higher education

  • corporates

  • instructional designers

  • schools

  • governments

  • startups
    
    

Read more

Reminder that you can read more details about the topics/results of the conference working group session here that are not covered in these minutes: