Purina Petcasts

During the past decade, the massive worldwide conversion of learning content from print and other older media on to digital networks has created gatekeepers who limit access to their digital content or require online users to pay for it.

A variety of gatekeepers have made a third choice:
to open their content freely into the Internet.
These are their stories.

August 17, 2006

Petcasts
Purina Pet Food

purina ad with kid

The Purina Petcasting feature at purina.com provides both informative and entertaining videos for pet owners. The Petcasts are a model of a method for delivering academic subjects.

puppy One of the Petcast series, called Complete Puppy Care, has 3 videos and 10 podcasts. Although Purina Puppy Chow is mentioned in the Petcasts, the materials are primarily instructive and contain useful information from very well qualified sources. The puppy shown in the illustration is from a frame in one of the videos that explains how to use a crate to housebreak a puppy. Although the puppy shown does not seem to agree, Purina advises that young dogs feel secure in a crate.

There are two ways in which Purina's Petcasts suggest major open educational resources value potential from corporate website projects:

First, corporations have knowledge that has value in education, and corporate websites have large budgets. Corporations that use a portion of their website budget to teach what they know are creating open content for learning. Encouraging websites to include useful knowledge is a way to stimulate the growth of open educational resource.

Second, corporate website can create—as Purina has done with Petcasting—models for interfacing knowledge online. As the education sector participates more fully in the future in online content presentation, they can turn to models like Petcasting for ideas for interfacing other topics.

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