Tuesday, December 18th, 2007...3:36 pm
Open University Facebook Application
The Course Profiles app that Liam, Tony, Martin and I have been working on has been getting quite a lot of love recently. We have been approached by Karine Joly of Higher Education Experts about featuring in her publication and giving a webinar, and now no less an authority than Stephen Downes has awarded us the Best educational use of a social networking service in his `Downsy Awards’.
The app itself is going well and we now have 2,633 users, which, baring in mind we have a primary target audience of 4.5K (i.e. the OU network, and then it’s primarily the students within this network rather than staff that this is aimed at – for the moment at least 
). The graph below shows how our user base has grown.
Of course, in true web2 style we’re in perpetual beta so the app is never actually `final’ and we’ve got some great updates in the pipeline, some of which may come in the next release, some in the next-but-one. Some of these improvements are:
- Rotating the news feed items for friends of user, i.e. instead of saying “What OU courses have you studied” different items will appear to alert people as to the different features of the app.
- Links to groups on FB for courses.
- Possible link up to use XCRI-CAP data.
- Support for degree codes (i.e. `I am studying towards Computing and Statistics B34’).
- Course recommendations – (i.e. based on others who have taken the course you are studying, you might also like x,y,z).
- A reasonably comprehensive overhaul of the user interface. There will be a much more sticky area for the user to visit which will show:
- Replies to my course comments.
- Comments people have left about courses I intend to study in the future.
- New courses that my friends have added.
- In general this will be a summary of the activity in the network; you will then be able to dig into this further by course code.
Then of course there are the other apps that we have up our sleeves – the closest to release of which is the `My OU Story’ app – but I’ll leave details of that to another post.
We’ve also been approached by quite a few individuals and groups around the OU who are interested in us developing some applications for them, as well as those from other university staff and students who would like either to have support for their courses in the Course Profiles app, or would like us to work on something new for them. If you have ideas along these lines, either leave me a comment here, or sign up to our not-very-official T.0AD profile page on FB and leave a post on the wall.
I can’t sign off without posting up some images that comrade Hirst has pulled together after mining the data from the Course Profiles app. i’m not going to try and explain what they mean, they just look cool – and that’s good enough for me!
8 Comments
December 18th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
SO here’s a bit of interpretation.
For the diagram with all the pie charts, and the chart with the number 117:
- the users who declared T175 as completed also declared 117 other level 1 (L1) courses.
– of those L1 courses, approximately 3/4 (the blue segment of the chart) were declared as completed.
The yellow shows future declared courses. So the majority of current T175 students who have declared other Level 1 courses are doing those course in the future.
(Just a note – the sample sizes as still small and we shouldnlt really read anything in to them!)
I think the network diagram shows, for any student who declared T175, the other courses they are currently taking, have completed, or intend to take in the future. Or it might show the courses that have been declared by students currently, previously or intending to take T175. I can’t remameber…
Ideally, the size of the course code nodes would be proportional to the number of students who made that declaration (which would be confusing where the course has been declared with more than one status by different students – so maybe those nodes would beed to be pie charts also?)
PS the visualisations were done with the IBM Many Eyes tool.
December 18th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Arrghhh – I meant:
“The GREEN shows future declared courses. So the majority of current T175 students who have declared other Level **2** courses are doing those course in the future.”
January 14th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Keep seeing OU and Facebook linked. Facebook gets a thorough panning in today’s Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook
Quite alarming in fact. To be avoided.
cheers
Jacob
February 20th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Nice work, guys!!!
July 1st, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Ideally, the size of the course code nodes would be proportional to the number of students who made that declaration (which would be confusing where the course has been declared with more than one status by different students – so maybe those nodes would beed to be pie charts also?)
July 4th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
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October 15th, 2008 at 3:14 am
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April 30th, 2009 at 5:06 am
I think the network diagram shows, for any student who declared T175, the other courses they are currently taking, have completed, or intend to take in the future.
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