Engage wider audiences with online report on English for Progress

English for Progress online

Report

Contents
Purpose of the report ...............................................................................................................................................2

Aims and objectives of EfPonline ............................................................................................................................ 2

Evaluation ................................................................................................................................................................ 2

Delivery platform ...................................................................................................................................................... 3

Promotion ................................................................................................................................................................ 3

EfPonline main features...........................................................................................................................................4

Landing page ....................................................................................................................................................... 4
Session pages...................................................................................................................................................... 4
Live streaming ...................................................................................................................................................... 4
Recordings ........................................................................................................................................................... 4
Blogs ....................................................................................................................................................................4
Interviews ............................................................................................................................................................. 4
Photos ..................................................................................................................................................................4
Twitter ..................................................................................................................................................................5

Audience engagement .............................................................................................................................................6

Internet coverage .....................................................................................................................................................7

Budget .....................................................................................................................................................................7

Summary of web statistics .......................................................................................................................................8

Breakdown of web statistics ....................................................................................................................................8

Web pages ........................................................................................................................................................... 8
Live streaming ....................................................................................................................................................10
YouTube ............................................................................................................................................................. 10
Blogs ..................................................................................................................................................................11

Appendix 1: EfPonline ‘e-vite’ ................................................................................................................................ 13

Report author
Stephen Jenner
stephen.jenner@in.britishcouncil.org

14 December 2009


Report

Purpose of the report
This report aims to present an overview and evaluation of ‘English for Progress online’ (EfPonline), which was
developed to run alongside the Third Policy Dialogue, Delhi 18-20 November 2009. The site is available at
www.britishcouncil.org.in/EfPonline. The content of the report may be of interest to any organization intending to
run an online ELT event, and especially to BC offices worldwide looking to develop a delivery platform.

Aims and objectives of EfPonline
EfPonline aimed to bring the discussions at the Third Policy Dialogue to a wider audience in India and Sri Lanka
and worldwide. It was assumed that discussions on teacher education and training, English in the corporate
sector, and the launch of David Graddol’s new research ‘English Next India’ would attract an international
audience in addition to engaging with the Project English audience in India and Sri Lanka.

The objectives for the online event were to:

1. Engage with remote audiences (see target audiences below).
2. Create a permanent record of conference proceedings.
3. Demonstrate the BC’s ability to use ICT tools effectively.
4. Promote the launch of English Next India.

Specific target audiences were identified:

1. T1 and T2 contacts in the corporate and state education sectors not present at the conference.
2. T3 teachers, corporate trainers, learners, i.e. the ‘recipients’ of policy decisions.
3. ELT contacts and stakeholders in the UK and internationally.
4. BC staff worldwide, especially those involved in ELT activities.
5. Conference participants themselves.

Evaluation
No specific targets were identified for web hits and unique users because there was no comparable event to
benchmark EfPonline against. Rather, it was hoped that the quantity and quality of content generated would
show this to be successful and worthwhile initiative.

The main successes of EfPonline were:

The majority of content (recordings, interviews and photos) were all uploaded during the two day event itself
The delivery platform proved to be an effective way to reach our target audiences, was easy to manage and
inexpensive
The event was very interactive, with remote audiences able to take part in conference discussions via the
blog and film comments page
Content generated by the blogs was of very high quality and succeeded in drawing in a range of T1 to T3
contacts
The BC was seen by conference delegates and the remote audience as effectively using ICT
The event contributed to the highest ever recorded web traffic for BC India

The main learning point is that the online event took a lot of the time of managers who during the event were not
able to devote sufficient time to the physical conference. Time management during the event would need to be
planned well if we run a similar online conference in the future.

2

© The British Council, India 2009


Report

Delivery platform
A combination of three types of delivery platform was used:

1. BC India web site to host the EfPonline landing page.
2. Existing BC India accounts with Wordpress, YouTube and Picassa to host blogs, videos and photos.
3. Specially designed web pages to host session pages and film pages.

The use of this combination had several advantages:

1. Using the BC India site allowed us to draw in traffic to the overall site and easily link to Project English and
the Third Policy Dialogue pages.
2. Using existing BC accounts with Wordpress, YouTube and Picassa had the potential to draw traffic to other
BC projects (e.g. Low Carbon Futures) which also have accounts. The use of established web 2.0 tools
opens up the content of EfPonline to a much wider audience. These tools are also user friendly (for the
uploader as well as for the downloader) and easy to access.
3. Commissioning the design of special pages for sessions and films allowed us to introduce functionality
which is not available to the BC with its Obtree web content management system.

The customer journey was considered very carefully. A viewer took four steps in order to view a film:

1. EfPonline landing page to access the conference programme
2. Click on the desired session on the conference programme
3. Read the abstract, speaker bio/s, presentation/s and click on a link to watch the film
4. The film page shows the live stream or recording with a ‘live’ comments box

Promotion
Promoting EfPonline before the actual event was critical to its success. The aim was to build up a ‘critical mass’
of viewers who were interacting online and promoting the event before it started. This was achieved through the
blog and Twitter; blog discussions on conference themes were started two weeks before the event and
succeeded in drawing in a large audience. One blog discussion on ‘Which variety of English should be taught?’
generated nearly 50 comments before the conference from bloggers worldwide. The EfPonline Twitter account
attracted over 30 followers before the event, which meant that conference tweets were reaching many more
Twitterers as a result of ‘re-tweets’ (when a follower sends your update to all their followers).

The name ‘Efponline’ was chosen for the online event to give consistency and allow easy web searching. The
name formed part of the url of all web pages and the tag #efponline was used in the blogs and Twitter.

EfPonline was promoted to the target audience via postings on the Talking English newsletter, ELTeCS, a
banner on the British Council home page, the home pages of India and Sri Lanka sites, and on the home page
of Teaching English. A specially designed ‘e-vite’ (see Appendix 1) was sent via email to:

All invited delegates and speakers
BC internal mailing lists (MM forum, TechTeach, YL Forum, TT Forum)
NASSCOM members
All staff India and Sri Lanka
UK based E&E senior management and Communications
UK ELT contacts

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Report

EfPonline main features

Landing page

www.britishcouncil.org.in/efponline

The landing page gave an introduction to the event and links to all the main features.

Session pages

www.britishcouncil.org/india-projects-english-tpdschedule.htm

A conference programme page was created where the user could click on the session page they wanted to
view. The session pages contained the title and day/time of the session, the abstract, speaker’s bio and photo
and presentation for download. There was also a link to the live stream or recording.

Live streaming

An external vendor, 24 Frames Digital based in Mumbai, was chosen to deliver live web streams. 9 sessions
were streamed over 2 days, to very high quality. Two download speeds were available. After each session the
stream was converted into a recording for upload. One fixed camera was used in order to keep costs down. This
meant that the viewer was only able to see the stage (as the camera was not able to pan the room).

Recordings

In addition to the live streams that were converted into recordings, 6 parallel sessions were also recorded and
uploaded to the site, using a professional film crew. The recordings were played using Vimeo player, which is a
free third party plug-in video player. Both the live stream and recording film pages had a comments box, where
users could add their comments on the session. The comments were updated in real time (after moderation)
and archived so that each user could view all the comments that had been made, whether viewing the live
stream or recording.

Blogs

http://britishcouncilindia.wordpress.com/

The BC India Wordpress account was used to set up an ‘English for Progress online’ blog. An internal blogging
team (Senior Training Consultants based in Chennai and Colombo) were asked to post on topics relevant to the
conference and engage in discussion. To date the EfPonline blog has generated 51 posts and 201 comments.

Interviews

www.youtube.com/user/Britishcouncilindia

A film crew was engaged to conduct formal, sit down interviews with key contacts during the conference. In
addition, roving interviewers used Flip HD video recorders to capture ‘on the spot’ interviews with delegates and
speakers. Chetan Bhagat’s evening address was also filmed and uploaded. 29 films were uploaded.

Photos
http://picasaweb.google.com/BritishCouncilIndia

An official photographer captured images during the conference, in order to give a flavour of the event to the
remote audience. 94 photos were uploaded to the British Council Picassa account during the conference.

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Twitter

http://twitter.com/efponline

Twitter is a social networking application which allows the user to create an account and update their own home
page with a single ‘Tweet’ or message of 140 characters or less. Users can ‘follow’ other users, which means
they also see the updates of the people they follow on their home page. The activity of following and being
followed is what makes Twitter a powerful networking tool, because it is possible to build a personal network
very quickly and easily and find new contacts. The use of tags (a user inserts a hash tag before a key word in
the tweet) has turned Twitter into a very effective search engine; it is possible to search for key words inside
Twitter and so find new discussions and contacts in a chosen field. Twitter currently has over 1 million users
worldwide. A 2008 Harvard report estimated that 10% of Twitterers post 90% of Tweets, implying that the
application is used by core groups. There are many specialist networks using Twitter, e.g. ELT groups, who post
updates about conferences, new research/practice and discussions.

For EfPonline Twitter was used to:

1. Promote EfPonline before the event by sending updates of new content uploaded to the web site and
building an audience of followers.
2. Cover the conference while it was taking place by sending tweets of the content of session content. This is
called ‘micro blogging’ and effectively allows users to follow the proceedings of a conference remotely in
real time.
3. Announce when live streams were about the take place. In fact, Twitter was the only tool available which
could make announcements over the web in real time.

To date the EfPonline Twitter account has attracted 37 followers (including 2 Twitter ELT ‘lists’) and 67 tweets
have been sent. The tag #efponline was used on all tweets. The ‘Tweetcloud’ below shows all the keywords on
Twitter grouped around this tag.

The most interesting fact about the Twitter account is that it was the second biggest referrer, after the EfPonline
landing page. This shows the huge potential of Twitter as a marketing tool.

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Audience engagement
Engagement with target audiences (defined on p.2) can be measured in two ways:

1. People who joined the discussion on the blog

Name Organisation Designation/job Location

George Pickering N/A ELT Consultant UK
Manish Sabarwal Teamlease CEO and Founder Delhi
Sarita Manuja RBI Director Punjab
Amol Padwad N/A Editor ELTeCS ISL India
David Graddol The English Company Freelance writer UK
Shefali Kulkarni N/A Freelance trainer Kerala
K Chattopadhyay Bankim Sardar College Sr Lecturer in English West Bengal
Nishant Lohagun JNU Student Delhi
K S Manojkumar Trainer and founder Academy of English Language Pune
Uma Raman HCL Technologies DGM Skills Enhancement Chennai
G. H.Asoka Project Leader Bilingual Ed National Institute of Education Sri Lanka
Shefali Bakshi Amity School of Languages Deputy Director Lucknow
Anamika Basu Genpact Training Manager Hyderabad
Carmen Rhor Universidad S.Ignacio De Loyola Part time teacher Peru
Anupma Diddi Young Learners Academy Course Director Mumbai
Susan Hillyard N/A Teacher trainer, materials writer Argentina

2. The comments people left on the blog and film pages

“It’s really a fantastic initiative to have a virtual event alongside the actual one. This will expand the reach of the
event tremendously and may allow the participation of much larger section of concerned people.”

Amol Padwad

A very good initiative by the British Council to hold a dialogue and deliberate on such important issues of
Language. We talk about Indian Council for languages but one needs to take the initiative and start something
of this kind. Kudos to BC and thanks to them in making me a part of such a wonderful event.

Shefali Bakshi

really cool! the live streamimg was awesome.. very clear, very less buffering.. loved the panel discussion on
multilingualism.

Sarita Manuja

Thanks very much to British Council for providing the live streams. I tuned in to watch some of the live streams.
It was very interesting and informative. Congratulations to all the presenters. All did splendidly well.

Anooja Nair

Thank you all so much for making my presence possible even though I’m so far away. The joy of technology
and the willingness of people to share and discuss openly!

Susan Hilyard

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Report

Internet coverage
Some web sites picked up the content of EfPonline and re-produced it on specially created pages on their sites:

Webinar News
www.webinarreviews.org/webcast-english-for-progress-online/

ELT World News
www.eltworld.net/news/2009/07/india-english-for-progress/

Nagpur University
http://nagpuruniversity.blogspot.com/2009/07/learn-english-english-for-progress.html

Bilingual Education Platform
http://bilingualeduc.ning.com/events/english-for-progress-third

ELT World
www.eltworld.net/2009/07/india-english-for-progress/

Budget

Activity INR GBP*

Webcaster (2 days) 215,085 2,801
Internet lines at Hyatt 94,200 1,227
Web page design 25,000 326
Film crew 80,000 1,042
Rent of 2 Reliance dongles 2400 31
Test stream equipment + crew 20,000 260

Total 436,685 5,686

*BKR = 76.8

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Summary of web statistics
Area Unique users Page views Posts Comments Followers

Live stream videos 192 - 19 Nov 377 - 19 Nov N/A 19 N/A
233 - 20 Nov 464 - 20 Nov

All web pages No information 11,099 N/A N/A N/A
available

Blog N/A 3,677 51 201 N/A

YouTube N/A 1,160 N/A N/A N/A

Twitter N/A N/A N/A N/A 37

All stats are to date figures.
Unique users are defined as a single IP address.
Page views are the total number of times a page is visited.
Stats for other projects/events using the BC blog have been removed.

Breakdown of web statistics

Web pages

Page Visits Views

English for Progress online - Landing page 1788 2205
http://www.britishcouncil.org/india-english-efp-online

English for Progress online - Programme Schedule 1247 1819
http://www.britishcouncil.org/india-projects-english-tpdschedule

English Next India: Policy Implications 731 893
http://www.britishcouncil.org.in/efponline/sessions/19_1.html

Web Casting 671 1123
http://www.britishcouncil.org.in/efponline/webcasting/Vimeomain.asp

Inauguration and Introduction to ENI 410 530
http://www.britishcouncil.org.in/efponline/sessions/18.html

Rozgar Project: British Council India 303 1046
http://www.britishcouncil.org.in/efponline/ sessions/19_3.html

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Report

Managing a Silent Revolution 252 402

Transforming the Workforce for 2020 Part 1 206 275
http://www.britishcouncil.org.in/efponline/sessions/19_2_1.html

The Future of English Language Education: Methodological choices 204 340

Bringing India s National Curriculum Framework to Life 187 272

Transforming the Workforce for 2020 Part 2 173 224

Meeting the recruitment challenge 169 231

Continuous Professional Development 163 234

In-service and pre-service English Language Teacher Education 140 207

Testing Language Proficiency: Models for Indian Higher Education Sector 127 189

Education for All 124 185

Recommendations and conclusions emerging from the first day 117 156

From planning for change to seeing intended change in practice 112 146

English Next India: Policy Implications for English Teaching 107 135
http://www.britishcouncil.org.in/efponline/sessions/20.html

Effective Partnership in Examination Policy Reform Projects 105 148

The Role of English in Conflict Transformation 104 140

International qualifications for students as an incentive 99 150

The Way Forward 46 49

Totals 7585 11099
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Report

Live streaming

These web logs from the webcaster show the stats for the live streams on both days of the conference.

Event Date: 19/11/2009 Event Date: 20/11/2009
For Low Speed: 100Kbps For Low Speed: 100Kbps

Hits: 255 Hits: 255
Visitors: 129 Visitors: 116
Cities: 10 Cities: 11
Data Transfer: 1.64GB Data Transfer: 1.42GB
Countries: 4 Countries: 6

Event Date: 19/11/2009 Event Date: 20/11/2009
For High Speed: 250Kbps For High Speed: 250Kbps

Hits: 122 Hits: 209
Visitors: 63 Visitors: 117
Cities: 8 Cities: 8
Data Transfer: 1.82GB Data Transfer: 3.78GB
Countries: 6 Countries: 7

YouTube

A total of 29 films were uploaded (some films were split up due to the 10 min limit on a single YouTube film).
League table of page views (above 10) shows:

Film Views Film Views

Chetan Bhagat 239 Stephen Jenner 17
Nandan Nilekani 212 Som Mittal 15
Delhi DoE 184 Rod Bolitho 14
Jill Coates 53 Julian Parry 14
Martin Davidson 51 George Pickering 16
Delhi school children 40 Dinali Fernando 13
Alison Barrett 34 Nirupa Fernandez 10
Chris Gibson 33 Maya Menon 8
Philippa Mathewson 29 Prof Abhai Maurya 4
David Graddol 28 Nirupa Fernandez 10

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Report

Blogs

Wordpress allows the admin user to gain a wealth of information into blog use:

1. Over 3000 page views were recorded. The busiest day was 20 Nov (day 2 of the conference) with 348 views.
This chart shows the number of views over three months since the BC blog was set up. The sharp increase in
views for Nov shows how much traffic was generated for the BC blog by English for Progress online.

2. Referrals occur when someone clicks through to your site (in this case the blog) from a link. The chart below
shows the top referrers above 5 clicks. Not surprisingly most users clicked through from the EfPonline landing
page. More surprising is that Twitter was the second highest referrer (when 3 entries are put together).

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Report

3. This chart shows the top posts by page view (above 20 views). The first topic on varieties of English was
clearly a topic that caught the imagination of bloggers.

12



Report

Appendix 1: EfPonline ‘e-vite’

13


Engage wider audiences with online report on English for Progress

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