edufeedr — following and supporting learners in open blog-based courses

EduFeedr — following and supporting learners in open blog-based courses

Hans PõldojaTallinn University, Estonia

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(massive) open online courses

Learning environment

Learning content

Student blogs

Course wiki and bloglink and tag

link and tag

link

link

RSS

link

link and tag

link

Problem

How to follow and support learning activities which cross the borders of different Web

2.0 applications?

Vision

Requirements and limitations

• Support for all major blogging platforms using open standards (RSS, Atom, trackback, pingback)

• No special plug-ins should be required on the student blogs

• Only teacher has an user account in EduFeedr, which allows her to modify the EduFeedr settings

• Anyone has read access to aggregated course content

Design methodology

Design methodology

• Lightweight prototyping

• Scenario-based design

• Participatory design sessions

• User stories

• Paper prototyping

Current implementation of

EduFeedr

http://www.edufeedr.net

ManyEyes visualization

Downloads

• OPML file with blog posts feeds

• OPML file with blog comments feeds

• vCard file for Address Book

• Tab separated file with social network data

Technical implementation

Development platform

• EduFeedr is developed as Elgg plugin

• SimplePie PHP library is used for aggregating feeds

• JSViz JavaScript library is used for social network visualization

• NuSOAP toolkit for PHP

MySQL MySQL /InnoDB

EduSuckrback-end serviceWSDL / SOAP

EduFeedrfront-end

REQUEST with credentials

RESPONSE with data

Crontab initiatedaggregation of

content

BlogsUser

Open source

Current limitations

Current limitations

• Comments feed is currently located only for Blogger and WordPress

• Linking student posts with the assignments

• Linking comments with the participants

• Unrelated posts in the course feed

• Only recent items are available in the RSS/Atom feeds

Conclusions and future work

Evaluation

• User testing in Tallinn University: 4 courses running

• Think aloud usability testing

Future work

• Aggregating recent content from various Web 2.0 services

• Providing visualization widgets for external web sites

• Archiving the course posts and comments

Value for the open education

• Portal of open courses

• Learners can create their personal learning environments

• Can be used as a central component of the learning environment or just as an enrollment tool

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by European Social Fund’s Doctoral Studies and Internationalisation Programme DoRa

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Thank You!

Hans Põldoja

Research Associate

Tallinn University, Estonia

hans.poldoja@tlu.ee

http://www.hanspoldoja.net

http://www.slideshare.net/hanspoldoja

http://www.edufeedr.net

Follow us:

http://blog.edufeedr.org

Twitter: @EduFeedr