Make useful videos, publish them once or twice per week, and do this for two years

Many people have predicted that the future of work is in portfolio jobs made up of multiple income streams, including online courses. This week YouTuber and Junior Doctor, Ali Abdaal released his 2020 income that gives information on what that portfolio might look like and how someone might get there. Ali’s income revolves around his Youtube channel, which currently has 1.3 million subscribers.

Ali Abdaal’s 2020 Revenue – £1,013,000

A full-time job as a doctor £22,100 (First seven months of the year only)
Youtube Adsense £100,695
Affiliates £132,471
Sponsors £136,000
Skills share courses including affiliate links £350,000
Online Part-time YouTuber Academy course £220,000
Alumni inner circle membership £53,000

The online part-time Youtuber Academy course and Alumni Inner circle membership

Ali recently launched his first online cohort-based course. The course lasts four weeks and starts at $1495 for the Essential Edition. Premium and Executive editions cost $2495 and $4995 and provide additional features including lifetime access to future courses and further access to Ali and his team. The course’s first cohort had three hundred and sixty students enrol for a total income of £220,000. Ali chose to charge this amount to provide a premium service that would deliver meaningful change in his students. In the video, he explains that people need accountability and community to help them learn from a course in today’s world of unlimited online content. By charging a significant fee for a four-week part-time academy, he can get heavily involved. He delivers sessions live, provides access to himself and his team, and can do much more to help his students make it as creative entrepreneur’s on YouTuber.

If you build an audience over a long period of time who, know, like, and, trust you, then when you start charging real money for a product which is actually good, people will be happy to pay that money and pay for access to you.
Ali Abdaal

The course was so successful that the students asked for ongoing access to the community and Ali. An impressive one hundred and twenty-four students (34% progression rate) have signed up for membership of the Alumni inner circle service. Features of the Inner circle include a monthly coaching call with Ali, guest workshops, additional content, and weekly and daily events.

This idea of building a following via YouTube and social media and then providing access to you via an online course is an interesting one compared to the University model. Large institutions leverage their longstanding reputations and Government protection to attract students and charge them significant amounts of money to provide them with the content, accountability, and community Ali refers to. Courses like this one are beginning to develop sophisticated delivery models and provide motivated students with the skills they require to succeed at work. Will we start to see academics pursuing a portfolio job, working part-time for Universities while building a YouTube follow that they then use to deliver courses directly to students?

Building a portfolio job

Most of us rely almost entirely on a single source of income. This should scare us more than it does. For several years, Ali has asked his coworkers if they would continue to work in medicine if they won the lottery. Half respond they would leave immediately, and the other half say they would go part-time. When asked why they do not become part-time now, the answer is usually related to money. The video gives some useful advice for anyone wanting to start becoming a creative entrepreneur and making some, or all, of their living from the internet.

…If you want to seriously want to get to this level…of making money online, you have to put in large amounts of work over a very long period of time. But the good news is that all of this is really, really fun so it won’t feel like work hopefully.
Ali Abdaal

Ali’s full-time job is a tiny fraction of his full income, and he can hire two full-time employees and another part-time to help run it. He notes that all his various income streams result from posting useful videos to his YouTube channel, twice per week for the last three and a half years.

Like every good thing in life, the progress is slow, but if you keep at it consistently over a very long period of time, then hopefully things will start to compound.
Ali Abdaal

Google Adsense income from short video adverts and banner ads on Ali’s YoutTube videos. Monetising a YouTube channel through Adsence requires a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time. He provides the annual growth of this income:

2017 – 59 videos – 1,600 subs – £0
2018 – 88 videos – 120k subs – £12,329
2019 – 62 videos – 450k subs – £33,186
2020 – 98 videos (307 total) – 1.3M subs – £100,695

Once the channel grew and the subscriptions and watch time increased, affiliates through Amazon affiliate links and similar, and sponsorship income started to grow. Again, Ali stresses that this income relies on the success of the YouTube channel. Ali also introduced several Skillshare courses in areas including productivity and study skills that are currently his highest income stream but rely on a massive scale driven by his YouTube channel’s popularity.

Success = work x luck x unfair advantage.

Work in this equation involves consistently publishing content that is as useful as possible. Ali mentions that he is routinely spending upwards of six hours per night, developing his skills, researching, and producing content and has been for the last fourteen years. The luck is the type that comes from putting lots of work to take advantage of the opportunities when they arise. This luck includes the YouTube algorithm. Most of his videos get viewing figures around 20% of his subscription numbers, but his videos’ small fraction will often earn significantly more views. The challenge is there is no knowing which videos will go viral and which will get baseline figures. Unfair advantages are the things that you bring to the table that others can’t. Ali provides the example of when he started making videos and was studying medicine at Cambridge University. He used being a trainee doctor and Cambridge University’s reputation to attract people to his channel before proving himself as an individual. He made videos that played off these two elements to build his early subscriptions. Ali suggests that any new YouTuber works from their unfair advantages to help get their first views and subscribers.

So the challenge for any aspiring YouTuber: Make useful videos, publish them once or twice per week, and do this for at least two years, and you will get success.

Watch the full video on YouTube and subscribe to Ali Abdaal’s channel. Get in touch with me on Twitter to let me know what you think.

Problem-based learning: the solution to the skills gap?

In the 2019 QS Global skills gap report, the top five skills that employers identified as a missing in most graduates were:

problem-solving
communication
teamwork
data skills
resilience.

Research in Canada suggests that undergraduate students increase their problem-solving skills in year one but then see no increase in their course’s second and third years. University lecturers can introduce active learning methodologies such as problem-based learning to narrow this skills gap and better prepare graduates for the workplace.

Problem-based learning is a student-centred approach to learning and teaching. Barrows and Tamblyn introduced the method in the 1960s to teach students at the medical school at McMaster University. Students use trigger material to identify an open-ended problem that they then attempt to solve. The process teaches students to take responsibility for their learning, acquire knowledge independently, communicate, work in a team, problem-solve, and present information.

In problem-based learning (PBL) students use “triggers” from the problem case or scenario to define their own learning objectives. Subsequently they do independent, self directed study before returning to the group to discuss and refine their acquired knowledge. Thus, PBL is not about problem solving per se, but rather it uses appropriate problems to increase knowledge and understanding.
British Medical Journal (BMJ)

The students are required to determine their own goals to the presented scenarios or problems through group discussions. Once they have defined the problem, they map out what they know already that will help solve the problem and attempt to determine what else they need to find out. Students then identify how and where they can find this information through research articles, journals, web materials, textbooks and set off individually to collect it. The group then comes to bask together to organise their research, produce a solution to the problem, and then present it.

The teamwork element is key to the methodology. Students work in groups of 8 to 15 to collect each individuals knowledge and ideas, differing perspectives, perceptions, and come up with multiple solutions to the problem. Discussions, both online and face to face are essential, and collaborative research methods are crucial.

Introducing a new teaching method is challenging for both the lecturer and the student, especially when shifting from a tutor-led to a student-led way of working. Students are comfortable with their current role in the classroom and lecture hall and have developed the skills supporting the traditional delivery methods. The resources and space required for collaborative learning and the access to research materials can also stress the university infrastructure. A common issue for students when introduced to problem-based learning is information overload. Students need help to identify the boundaries of their research, or they keep going. Sweller and Cooper in 1985 suggested that students should first learn through worked examples and then gradually be introduced to problem-based learning with a gradual ‘fading’ of support given by the academic.

The problem-based learning process

Problem-based learning is a clearly defined method with a set process.

The Maastricht seven-jump process:

Clarify terms
define problems(s)
Brainstorming
structuring and hypothesis
Learning objectives
Independent study
Synthesis

Let me know on Twitter if you have tried or are going to try problem-based learning.

Change through challenge: the university course in running a marathon

Bobby Maximus, a strength coach and author, says it takes 130 hours to build a base level of fitness. He developed this idea through training high-performance individuals to achieve impressive feats of strength and conditioning. In his book, The Maximus body, he provides two examples of how one hundred thirty hours can be completed; through one meaningful hour per day, five days per week for six months or over twelve weeks, two hours per day Monday to Friday and one hour on Saturday. The vital part is 130 meaningful hours of training, and some attention paid to quality nutrition and recovery. Budget your time, set your schedule, and do the work.

A college business module learning to run a marathon

Andrew Johnston, a GRIT and Business faculty member at RRCC and marathon runner, developed a similar idea but with a different target audience. Johnston created Change through Challenge, a 22 Week course for students that had never run before, with a final exam of running the Arizona Rock n Roll marathon. With a classroom session, a group run, and three individual runs per week; the training commitment probably came close to 130 hours.

In Johnson’s introduction to business class, his students asked local business owners for their keys to success; the most frequent answer was developing character and life-skills including a passion for work, work ethic, persistence, determination, and grit. According to Angela Duckworth, who wrote the book by the same name, grit is passion and perseverance for long-term and meaningful goals. As a keen distance runner, Johnston decided that his students’ best way to develop grit was to train for and then complete a Marathon, a challenge that, if you do not put in the necessary work and training, you are not going to finish.

Starting a business is a big goal that often requires the creation of a detailed, written, and time-denominated business plan that breaks it down into small weekly tasks to achieve the goal… That’s identical to a marathon-training plan.
Andrew Johnston

Each of the 22 weeks has a Monday classroom seminar, a Saturday morning group trail run, and three runs per week that students do independently to achieve the weeks running goal. The Monday night seminar covers three elements; Diet, training, and the discipline of the week. The twenty-two disciplines include goal setting, the power of consistency, and dealing with setbacks. Each is then related to the students’ schoolwork, business, and life. The Premiss of the course; all the life-skills needed to succeed in education and business can be acquired and mastered through training for a marathon.

My Change through challenge module

These two examples of time-based courses have me thinking about my next challenge. Can I package a physical challenge into a module? In my work, we typically package modules into 200 hours of learning, and I like the idea of going beyond the base level that 130 hours suggests and achieving something more significant. As I will be teaching myself, it makes sense to make this a problem-based learning module where I start with an open-ended problem and work through a series of steps, with other people to solve it. As an endurance athlete, I will set myself a training target of at least 10 hours per week, giving me around 20 weeks to complete the challenge I set myself—more on this to come.

You can learn more about Change through challenge through Andrew Johnston’s Tedx talk. Let me know on Twitter if you want to start your 200-hour Change through challenge module, and we can all create a group.

And breath… Term one is over

Today marks the start of a two-week break for my team and me after nine months of intense work. We set out at the beginning of the year with an ambitions five-year plan to weave digital and in-person learning seamlessly across all courses at the university where we work.

In March, we pivoted to help move all teaching and assessment online. In June, we started a programme to offer one-on-one support for all modules in the university to move to a blended learning model within the government social distancing guidelines. We carried out over a thousand design workshops, countless emails and helpdesk tickets, and wrote or recorded hundreds of guides, webpages, and communications.

Term one is now over, and higher education is changed forever. Our initial plan is more or less complete, and we start to look at what is next. Will we ever see regular mass lectures again? Will students expect a HyFlex model where they chose online or in-person on a session by session basis? Or are we at a tipping point where new models of learning are about to be launched with methods we have not yet thought about?

As I sit here next to my Christmas tree, beer in hand, and Michael Buble singing ‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,’ I am thinking about the great people I work with and the things that they have achieved this year, and I can only smile. These questions are for tomorrow or for January. The next two weeks are about family, food, and that half-marathon time trial on Sunday that is really going to hurt.

Recording high production value Youtube videos

It is possible to get started making youtube videos with just an iPhone, webcam, or an entry-level DSLR. This post is going to cover the equipment needed to produce YouTuber style videos with good production value.

The best camera is the one that’s with you.
Chase Jarvis

There several things that you will want to get right before investing in expensive gear and most of them will take time and skill but little or no money. The first is quality content, you can have high production value, but if your content is weak, then it will be a waste of time. You can’t polish a turd as they say. People will forgive low-quality video, but they cannot ignore low audio quality. Find a quiet place to film, make sure that the mic is not picking up any external noises, and remember the closer the mic is to your mouth, the better the quality will be. Finally, plan your background.

In photography, the term framing refers to how you design what is in the picture. You will notice that academics usually have a bookcase in the frame to infer that they smart, or there might be some plants and exciting objects on a bookcase in the background to set a scene. However you frame your shot, make sure no lines coming out of the back of your head and google the rule of thirds to understand you to position a portrait.

An important point to make is that whatever camera you use will have different resolution settings make sure you set these up to record in the quality you want. An excellent place to start is with a 4K resolution, a framerate of 25fps, shutter speed 1/50, a 1.8 aperture (this will depend on your lens), and a 160 ISO for a cinematic look with a slight blur to the background. You can set up the white balance and picture profile too but read up on the camera you have to get the best quality you can out of it.

The Camera

There are many high-quality cameras targeted at youtube content creators; Sony’s Alpha 7C, the upgrade to the popular Sony A7iii is an excellent choice if you have the budget. Sony has added a rotating monitor and updated the autofocus specifically for video creators. The addition of a Sony 35mm F/1.8 or 25mm F/18 G-Master lenses works well for talking head videos. A quality tripod that can handle the weight of the camera and allow a variety of positions is a good idea. For audio, the ECM B1M mic that connects to the camera via the flash adapter or lapel mic will work, and for lighting an Aperture 120dII with the light dome II softbox will create soft light.

To edit your videos, I suggest Premier pro and access to a stock video library such as storyblocks. A couple of 4+ TB solid-state hard drives will keep everything backed up and be fast enough to edit some video directly off it. However, it is a good idea to have the video stored on your computer during editing to make sure it can be accessed without any lag.

Good luck and let me know on Twitter if you select this gear or an alternative.

If you build courses for a living, you should be taking courses for it too

I believe anyone working in online learning should be a serial student of online courses to master their craft. Obsessively taking classes gives a learning designer two powers; the first it allows them to understand how excellent and poor courses are put together, the second is they get empathy for the students that will take the courses they build.

Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.
Bruce Lee

Knowing the learning theory, research, and technology is essential. Applying design principles will maximise the return of these three skillsets. Still, nothing will give you the sensitivity like being an online student.

There are lots of great online courses that you can find for free that are doing some exciting things such as KhanAcademy.org, Brililiant.org, the Youtube creators academy, and the free sample modules of Quantic.edu. Udemy has some great courses that can be reasonably cheap if you catch them in the sale, and the Interaction design foundation courses are essentials for any aspiring learning designer.

Nothing is quite like a cohort-based course though, so budget to do at least one per year or get your work to pay for it. Learning in a cohort can be much more attractive as an experience than self-paced courses and more rewarding, and building an online community is an art form that takes time to learn. An MIT course on the Get Smarter platform was the last one I took. The short course can be bundled together with other MIT online courses to get a Postgraduate certificate from the world-class University.

Get in touch on Twitter to let me know any good courses you have taken and what they have taught you about learning design.

The SAMR Learning Model

The first digital iteration of technology in any field tends to replicate its analogue predecessor, the next iteration then starts to exploit the possibilities
Kevin Kelly

SAMR is a model of learning and teaching created by Dr R. Puentedura frames the use of technology into four categories based on its impact on the student experience.

SAMR model

Enhancement
- Substitution – Technology acts as a direct substitute, with no functional change
- Augmentation – Technology acts as a direct substitute, with functional improvement
Transformation
- Modification – Technology allows for significant task redesign
- Redefinition – Technology allows for the creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable

The first two categories are where the teaching has been enhanced by technology, and the second two is where it has been transformed by technology. The use of technology in the enhancement categories may bring some benefits, but the real improvements come when technology is used to do something that was not possible or practical previously.

Substitution could be represented by synchronous video calls with all the students and academics present at the same time to replace an in-person seminar or pre-recorded video used to replace lectures. The technology has enabled remote access to learning, but the method of delivery has not really changed. Augmentation then brings some functional improvements such as the students using the chat function to create rich conversations around the seminar topic and answer each other’s questions with higher engagement than in a physical classroom with one person talking at a time and the most confident students taking up much of the dialogue. Lectures might be reproduced in smaller 6-10 minute videos interleaved with automated knowledge checks (self-marking quizzes) that allow all students to test their learning and the academic know which ideas might need revisiting.

The benefits of digital technologies will come with the modification of teaching and the move from a focus on ‘contact time’ to ‘learning hours’. Academics can be freed from the traditional constraints of the timetable and campus and design teaching around ideas and exploration rather than hour slots and room capacities. Modification might include the mixing of what used to be taught as in-class, such as the presentation of content in a lecture, and independent study, such as reading journal articles or problem sets to create a more natural route through the subject. Modification might be experiencing too by exploiting the interconnected nature of the internet to create new social learning experiences. Redefinition could suggest using technologies to allow students to take greater control of their learning and might include teaching through questions like platforms include Brilliant.org and Smart.ly or practical competency-based methods like Khan Academy that adapt to the strengths, weaknesses, and pace of each student. These digital approaches can free up time for academics to work with small groups of students on problem-based projects and other classroom-based active learning methods.

Redefinition should be the goal in the redesigning of learning and teaching, using the internet to remove the traditional constraints of in-person instruction and create a richer student experience around the subject narrative.

How to use SAMR

Universities could use the SAMR learning model as a benchmarking exercise to help people understand how technology can transform teaching to help planning or as an audit approach at module, course, and department level to understand the maturity of blended and online learning practice. It could just be used as a framework to help academics think about the use of technology in teaching and remove the pressure of moving too quickly.

It is at this point in the year that university leaders and academics are starting to think about next year. Do we move back to predominantly in-person teaching, continue with our enhanced approaches or learn from emerging transformational practice that will deliver a step-change in the student experience? The more important question might be, how fast do we change? Do we push ahead with improvements and push academics too far or risk losing some momentum to protect teaching staff?

If possible, we need to maintain the progress we have made this year and allow the majority of academics to evolve their practice with some incremental enhancements while supporting those that want to go faster to create transformational approach. Redefine learning and teaching and can then be seen as a direction of travel with speed controlled by individuals as they become comfortable with the benefits different technologies can bring.

Watch a six-minute video with Dr Ruben Puentedura describe his model. Get in touch on Twitter if you are thinking about using the SAMR model or are starting to plan what the 2021/22 academic year and beyond might look like.

Caramel coffee, Panda Dung tea, and gaining aesthetic and ethical knowledge

It is strange how your memory works and the way you connect specific Knowledge with experiences, even if they are entirely unrelated. My wife bought me a series of Chrismas coffee pods calendar for our coffee machine as a homemade advent. Each morning I come down to the kitchen and see a plate with two coffee pods and some other treats to mark one day closer to Christmas day.

This morning one of the pods was a caramel flavoured coffee that was distinct enough for me to stop my working and enjoy the hot cup of joy. While drinking it, I was transported to a sleepy bus ride in Thailand a few years ago between an airport and a ferry on the way to Koh Samui. I had fallen asleep listening to the Homo Deus audiobook by Yuval Noah Harari and woke up to a story about tea.

Take tea, for example. I start by drinking very sweet ordinary tea while reading the morning paper. The tea is little more than an excuse for a sugar rush. One day I realise that between the sugar and the newspaper, I hardly taste the tea at all. So I reduce the amount of sugar, put the paper aside, close my eyes and focus on the tea itself. I begin to register its unique aroma and flavour. Soon I find myself experimenting with different teas, black and green, comparing their exquisite tangs and delicate bouquets. Within a few months, I drop the supermarket labels and buy my tea at Harrods. I develop a particular liking for ‘Panda Dung tea’ from the mountains of Ya’an in Sichuan province, made from leaves of tea trees fertilised by the dung of panda bears. That’s how, one cup at a time, I hone my tea sensitivity and become a tea connoisseur. If in my early tea-drinking days you had served me Panda Dung tea in a Ming Dynasty porcelain goblet, I would not have appreciated it much more than builder’s tea in a paper cup. You cannot experience something if you don’t have the necessary sensitivity, and you cannot develop your sensitivity except by undergoing a long string of experiences.
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus

The author was describing the need for an alternative approach to the scientific method of empirical data and mathematics for gaining knowledge about ethical and aesthetic things. The humanist approach suggests Knowledge = Experiences x Sensitivity. Experiences are subjective and require a mixture of sensations, emotions, and thoughts. Sensitivity requires you to pay attention to your senses and then allow these sensations, feelings, and ideas to influence you. In this way, knowledge is built up with cycles of experiences and actively practising sensitivity to your reactions. This type of knowledge is not from a book but a practical skill gain by continuous iterations towards enlightenment.

Harari writes that ‘The highest aim of humanist life is to fully develop your knowledge through a large variety of intellectual, emotional and physical experiences.’ Close your computer, make a coffee, sit back in your chair and close your eyes, and start your journey to aesthetic and ethical knowledge.

Pick up a copy of Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow and contact me on Twitter once you have read it.

Can Hyflex save us?

Most universities are currently delivering via blended learning with social distancing. Students get a mix of in-person teaching supported by synchronous sessions via Microsoft Teams or Zoom and asynchronous online learning through pre-recorded video and digital activities. In most situations, academics have curated the mix by keeping collaborative learning in-person and moving content delivery online.

Many academics have struggled to adapt to this new mode of teaching that requires a skill set that they have had to pick up over the summer break and have not had a chance to explore and test with student groups to learn what works. There are varying views from students too; many students want more in-person teaching, whereas others want to stay away from campus to feel safe.

The Hyflex module of course design as started to be discussed as a possible solution to the rapid move to blended learning. In Hyflex, both online and in-person modes are developed for the same cohort, with multiple paths of equal quality through the content. Students have the choice on a session by session basis which mode is most suitable for them and building in shared comprehension checks, and discussion threads can bring the modes together.

This approach is different from a blended course where academics choose which parts are best delivered online and which are best delivered in-person. Also different from providing video feed of an in-person session for people who can’t attend. Hyflex puts the mode of learning entirely in the control of the student.

“You want to be able to create a fully online version and a fully face-to-face version and find ways to bring them together into a single course experience that has multiple participation paths … And the student gets to control whether they’re doing it online or in the classroom.”
Brian Beatty, creator of the Hyflex model

The Hyflex course design model was created by Brian Beatty and colleagues at San Fransisco State University and first introduced in 2006 to make their campus-based Masters course more accessible to their students, many of whom were working adults. It has been continually developed since and detailed in an ebook written by Beatty that he gives away for free.

I am interested in reading the book to understand the model fully. My first reaction was scepticism to the idea when an American university administrator raised it in a conversation at a conference. High-quality online learning and high-quality in-person teaching are hard to design and develop, so asking academics to do both for the same cohort was expecting a lot. Expecting them to have a cohesive thread running through the course to track engagement and maintain a community within a cohort when each student is continuously moving between modes seems like a high-level skill developed over many course iterations. To deliver at scale would present a challenge for staff new to online learning and require significant investment in training, support, and set up time.

For term one this academic year it was impractical to expect staff to develop fantastic blended courses in a short period due to workload. But many students feel they have not had enough in-person or quality online learning for their needs or preferences. Perhaps Hyflex development as an exolving approach where the course gets better over time might solve many of the problems we currently face and deliver authentic student-centred flexible learning.

Let me know what you think on Twitter.

Online programme Management (OPM): what are they good for?

Core competencies are the resources and skills that give an institution its unique place in the market. It is a management theory created by Prahalad and Hamel and published in the HBR in 1990. An institution should never outsource its core competencies.

An Online Programme Manager (OPM) company in the Higher Education sector is a private company that provides core services to a University to get them delivering online courses. These services typically come as a package for a percentage of the student fee with the University providing the academics and the degree awarding powers. The OPM may provide individual services such as marketing and recruitment with the institution doing the rest.

The typical services include:

Market research for which courses to develop
Marketing these courses
‘Active’ recruitment
Learning Design and development
A virtual learning environment ecosystem and other technologies to deliver the courses through
Student engagement & retention services

The question is, what are a university’s core competencies and, with an OMP deal, are we outsourcing these to a third party? It is clear the quality of the institutions academics are one, and the degree-awarding powers and how they maintain the rigour of these are another, but Learning design, and student engagement and retention services must be others?

For institutions that are starting in the online learning area, OPM deals can help them learn how to do online learning properly. However, it could be argued that the services OPMs provide are becoming core competencies. Universities that have not been developing these skills for the last few years will have found themselves with a vast skills gap this academic year with blended learning with social distancing delivery.

For those institutions looking to partner with an OPM:

Approach the partnership and the contract as an opportunity to learn how to do high-quality online learning not to outsource a future core competency.
Make sure the agreement provides opportunities to terminate the contract if the OPM does not deliver the required student numbers or quality promised.
Get the OPM to demonstrate, with examples, how they define quality online learning and make sure the team that build those examples are the team you will be getting.
Have a solid financial model for income and expenditure over the first three years and get evidence that the OMP can deliver this.

Get in contact with me on Twitter if you want to share experiences of working with OPMs or if you are thinking of partnering with one and want to talk it through.