50,000 Facebook views from a $30 investment: CYP-Media’s use of open practices to increase access to learning in the children and young people’s sector

Coughlan, Tony and Perryman, Leigh-Anne (2016). 50,000 Facebook views from a $30 investment: CYP-Media’s use of open practices to increase access to learning in the children and young people’s sector. In: Open Education Global Conference 2016, 11-13 Apr 2016, Krakow, Poland.

URL: http://conference.oeconsortium.org/2016/presentati...

Abstract

In 2015 Tony Coughlan was awarded the Open Education Consortium award for Creative Innovation, recognising the impact of his CYP-Media project in using open educational practices (OEP) to increase access to learning in the children and young people’s sector. Core to CYP-Media is a blog (www.cyp-media.org) in which Tony curates and evaluates free e-learning, textbooks and journals for working with children of different ages and needs. The reach of these blog posts is maximised by dissemination through Facebook and Twitter. The CYP-Media.org blog cost only $30 to set up, yet its impact is substantial. The CYP-Media Facebook page has an average reach of 7,244 per item, with a maximum of about 500 shares or 50,000 views of an individual item, and Tony himself has been identified as one of the top 50 most influential social media-using professionals in UK higher education. CYP-Media shows how just one person can make a huge difference to achieving educational and social equity with a tiny financial investment and a commitment to openness. This paper outlines the conceptual background to CYP-Media, with its roots in Perryman and Coughlan’s (2013) ‘public open scholar’ research, Weller’s (2011) concept of the ‘digital scholar’, and the emerging practice and theories of digital curation. The paper details CYP-Media’s multi-platform social media strategy and the challenges encountered since the project’s inception in 2010, in addition to presenting a mixed methods analysis of CYP-Media’s reception within the children and young people’s sector. We conclude that openness does not have to be the province of institutions and organisations, or even smaller projects and that by listening to the needs of your target audience, rather than adopting a top-down approach, real educational transformation through OEP is within the reach of anyone.

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