Conceptual Design of EduFeedr — an Educationally Enhanced

Mash-up Tool for Agora Courses

Hans Põldoja, Mart LaanpereTallinn University

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Introduction

MOOC?

Agora course

Photo by Zouzou Wizman, http://www.flickr.com/photos/

zouzouwizman/12129001/

Characteristics of Agora courses

• openly accessible content

• open personal learning environment

• free and open registration for participation

Learning environment

Learning content

Student blogs

Course wiki and bloglink and tag

link and tag link

link

RSS

link

Aggregating News Feeds in Mash-up Learning Environments

Problem

Problem

Standard RSS readers lack the features for monitoring and analyzing learning activities which cross the borders of different Web 2.0 applications.

Conceptual Design of EduFeedr

Methods

• Lightweight prototyping

• Scenario-based design

• Participatory design sessions

Prototyping a course database with Bento

Requirements

Requirements

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

• no special plug-ins should be reuquired on the student blogs

• the scope of EduFeedr is limited with aggregating and annotating the feeds from both teacher’s and students’ PLE’s and visualizing the process of knowledge building

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

• anyone has read access to aggregated course content

Scenario-based design

Scenarios

• First experience with EduFeedr

• Student is posting an assignment on her blog

• Exploring the connections between student blogs

• Setting up course feeds

• Archiving course posts and comments

• Using the offline client

Scenario 3: Exploring the connections between student blogs

John has been using EduFeedr for a few weeks. For him the most exiting feature is the way how connections between the blogs are presented. EduFeedr has a visualization where all the blogs are displayed as nodes. Lines between the nodes show the links between the blog posts. All the students have linked to the course blog. Some of the student blogs have a lot of connections while others have not been so active.

It is possible to switch on a different view and see who has commented which blog. This time John finds out that some student blogs have actually more comments than his blog.

The same information is also displayed as a table where it is easy to see how many pingbacks and comments each participant has made. EduFeedr has also aggregated all the comments. It means that John can see all comments that one student has made on a same page without visiting all the blogs. This will save him a lot of time, because commenting is part of his grading scheme and students get points for that.

Validating the scenarios

• Mozilla Foundation / Creative Commons open education course

• Two design sessions

Key features of EduFeedr

• Aggregating blog posts and comments from student blogs

• Displaying the progress of all the participants, possibility to filter and browse blog posts by a certain assignment

• Displaying the social network between the student blogs

• Teacher can write memos/comments about the blog posts

• Archiving blog posts and comments from student blogs

Connecting student posts with the assignment

• Three approaches

• By time

• By tag

• By link

• Blogger does not support pingbacks, can be solved by a special script

Conclusions and Future Work

Conclusions and Future Work

• User stories and UI mockups are currently in progress

• Choosing a suitable open-source development platform

• More information: http://www.edufeedr.org

Thank You!

• hans.poldoja@tlu.ee

• http://www.slideshare.net/hanspoldoja/