The Business Café Project: viewing to browsing?

This paper describes and discusses critically a unique experiment in using a combination of broadcast television and an interactive Web site to reach people interested in business and management. The Open University's Business School, in collaboration with the BBC mounted the project, called The Business Café . The paper outlines the contents of the nine broadcasts and the site, which changed weekly. Developing the broadcasts and maintaining the site required complex procedures and teamwork. The broadcasts attracted an audience of 300,000 UK viewers and the Web site recorded over 60,000 visits during the series. The stakeholders and others who offered much constructive criticism, identified more project outcomes during an evaluation. Useful lessons emerged, in particular about cross-team working and about learning from asynchronous networks like the Web. Web site:<URL>http://www.open.ac.uk/businesscafe [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]