Impact
(updated 2nd January 2012)
These statistics relate to the 1,309 days (187 weeks) since our launch into iTunes U on 3rd June 2008. In that time we have had:
- 44,225,000 downloads
- over 5,192,000 visitors downloaded files
- currently averaging* 291,500 downloads a week
- 90.0% of visitors from outside the United Kingdom
- 1 in 33.6 downloaders go on to visit the OU website (to 31 Dec 2011)
- 392 collections containing 3,103 tracks (1,427 audio, 1,676 video) and 27 extras (PDF)
284 of the collections contain audio visual material taken from 163 courses currently in presentation with the Open University
108 of the collections contain non-course specific material
96.5% of the tracks have transcripts (in PDF format) - 422 OpenLearn study units as eBooks (ePub), representing over 5,006 hours of study
- currently delivering an average* of 0.4 TB of data a week, with a further estimate of 3 – 4 TB delivered via Akamai, based on historical data before the use of Akamai
* average is based on last 4 weeks traffic
Chart 1 - Cumulative downloads and unique ips over time
Chart 2 - Geographical breakdown of downloads
(special update 3rd October 2011)
In September of 2009 it became possible to access the iTunes U site directly from iOS devices. In the following year the percentage of visitors (unique IP**) downloading at least one track direct to an iOS device (from OU on iTunes U) was around 30%, but since that time the behaviour has changed notably, raising to over 70% in July 2011, see chart A below.
Chart A - % Visitors (unique IP) downloading at least one track on an iOS device
- Chart B – Device breakdown for July 2011
Chart B (above) shows the device breakdown for both visitors (unique IP) who downloaded at least one track and by downloads for the month of July 2011. It is notable that the desktop iTunes client tends to generate more downloads per visitor (unique IP) than on iOS devices.
** Estimating visitors is done by calculating the number of unique IP addresses for each download from the OU on iTunes U site, this though has it’s limitations as a single IP address can be used by more than one person (via NAT’s) and equally a person may use more than one IP address, say by using different computers or with a mobile device that might access the internet from different Wi-Fi or mobile data cells, which themselves might use NAT’s. Most web based measurements of visitors is typically improved through the use of cookies, however this is not available for iTunes U, but it is believed that the unique IP represents a very good ‘proxy’ for number of visitors. For more information about Web analytics check out the Wikipedia entry – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics, particularly note the, particular the section on Common sources of confusion in web analytics.
