Jam, the BBC's £150m on-line learning service was scrapped earlier this year. Having written a piece asserting that usage data was needed to judge the extent to which use of the service was taking off, I requested usage and other data from the BBC under the Freedom of Information Act. In the continuation post below I include the BBC's introduction to its response of 24/4/2007, followed by the main questions put (in bold), together with the full responses (in italics). Any annotations by me are underlined.
For me, the "killer fact" that the data reveals is the low average weekly use made of the service per registered user, summarised in the chart below, which I made from the data provided by the BBC. (It is so low that I only half trust my calculations, and am waiting for someone to show me the "killer error".)
Freedom of Information request - RFI2007000290 - 26 April 2007
By way of background, you may be aware that the BBC Trust recently decided to suspend the online education service, BBC Jam, with effect from 20 March 2007. The Trust has requested BBC management to prepare fresh proposals for how the BBC should deliver theCharter obligation to promote formal education and learning, meeting the online needs of school age children. Once completed, the Trust will subject BBC management's proposals to a full Public Value Test, including a market impact assessment by Ofcom. Please note that we have not been able to give full responses to questions 1- 4 as we do not hold all the information requested. The limited functionality of the BBC Jam User Environment (in line with regulatory requirements) has very much restricted the information we have been able to collect.
1. The total number of registered users broken down by age, approximate
geographical location, and, if known, role, for each month from the
inception of the service in January 2006.
2. The number of registered users broken down by preferred language, with languages to include English, Gaelic, and Welsh.
The BBC holds data relating to total registered user numbers by month from February 2006 to February 2007, which we have attached as Annex A. (There is a graph of this data below.) We
regret that this data is not broken down by user age, geographical
location or role. As outlined above, the BBC Jam User environment had
extremely limited functionality and unfortunately it would not be
possible for us to extract the information you request within the
appropriate cost limit set down in the Act.
For this reason we are declining the remainder of this part of
your request under section 12 of the Act as the cost of complying with
the request would exceed the appropriate limit. Under the Freedom of
Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees)
Regulations 2004 we are permitted to decline a request if it would take
more than two and a half days to locate the information, or would cost
£450.
We have server log information from the period from
November 14 2006 till March 20 2007 and would need to investigate the
potential to match up visits by registered users with the launch of
resources. This data source is very large, it contains nearly 60
million records and it would take 3 to 4 days to develop and run the
queries that are necessary.
However, we do hold cumulative data
showing the total number of users by age, geographical location and
preferred language as at the cessation of the service in March 2007. We
have attached this data as Annex B. (There are 2 tables and a chart with this data below.)
Please note that this data is based solely on selections made by the
user upon entering the BBC Jam website and we have no evidence to
support its veracity.
| Country | No. of Registered Users | Percentage Share | ||
| England | 141,498 | 87.4% | ||
| Wales | 6,719 | 4.2% | ||
| Scotland | 10,178 | 6.3% | ||
| N Ireland | 3,452 | 2.1% | ||
| TOTAL | 161,847 | 100% |
| Language | No. of Registered Users | Percentage | ||
| English | 166,607 | 99.53% | ||
| Welsh | 781 | 0.47% |
For your information, only English and Welsh were offered as preferred languages, which users selected upon entering the BBC Jam website. Further, we have never collected data on a user’s role. By ‘role’, we assume you mean whether the user is a student, teacher or parent.
3. For the range of categories of user identified in response to
question 1, the average number of sessions per month for each category.
4. For each of the main content-titles available from the Jam web site
immediately prior to the suspension of the service, and for each of the
range of categories if user identified in response to question 1, the
number of unique users, the average number of sessions per month, and
the average duration of each session, for each content-title.
Please see attached as Annex C a graph showing the number of unique user-sessions for each week from 23 January 2006 through to 12 March 2007. (A clearer version of the same graph is below.) Please note that while this graph gives a good indication of relative activity on the service over time, it relates only loosely to visits by distinct individual visitors.
We regret that this is the only information we hold that is readily accessible to us. The same technical difficulties outlined above at Question 1 have prevented us from accessing this data and unfortunately for this reason we must also decline this part of your request under section 12 of the Act as it exceeds the appropriate cost limit as set out in the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.
5. For each of the remaining months of 2007, the titles of each content-topic that was due to be released and the planned release-date.
Please see attached as Annex D [40 kB PDF] details of content which was due to be released with planned release dates for 2007. It is important to note in relation to this information that dates were provisional only. The conditions of BBC Jam’s Service Licence required the BBC to publish in advance the subject releases for each calendar year, but not on a month by month basis. The BBC’s release plans were frequently updated for operational reasons.
6. The names of the commercial companies to whom contracts had been let by the BBC for the production of JAM content and, for each of these companies, the content-titles that had been commissioned, with actual or planned release dates.
Please see attached as Annex E [40 kB PDF] details of all BBC Jam external commissions from 2006 through to 2008. We have interpreted your request as including direct suppliers only. We have not included any minor pieces of work ordered from external suppliers to supplement commissions produced in-house.
As above, it is important to note in relation to this information that dates in 2007 and 2008 were provisional only. The BBC’s release plans were frequently updated for operational reasons.
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