EduFeedr is a tool that aggregates and visualizes student activity across different web applications used in open online courses. It addresses the problem of how to follow student learning activities that occur across multiple sites. EduFeedr uses open standards to support major blogging platforms and requires no plugins, with only teachers having user accounts. Anyone can access aggregated course content to follow student progress. Future work aims to better integrate content from various web services and provide visualization widgets for external sites.

1. EduFeedr — following and supporting learners in open
blog-based courses
Hans Põldoja
Tallinn University, Estonia

2. 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.

3. (massive) open online
courses

8. Learning environment

9. Learning content
Student blogs
Course wiki and blog
link and tag
link and tag
link
link
RSS
link
link and tag
link

12. Problem

13. How to follow and support
learning activities which cross
the borders of different Web
2.0 applications?

14. Vision

18. 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

19. Design methodology

20. Design methodology
• Lightweight prototyping
• Scenario-based design
• Participatory design sessions
• User stories
• Paper prototyping

21. Current
implementation of
EduFeedr

22. http://www.edufeedr.net

30. ManyEyes visualization

31. 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

32. Technical
implementation

33. 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

34. MySQL
MySQL /
InnoDB
EduSuckr
back-end serviceWSDL / SOAP
EduFeedr
front-end
REQUEST with credentials
RESPONSE with data
Crontab initiated
aggregation of
content
Blogs
User

35. Open source

36. Current limitations

37. 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

39. Conclusions and future
work

40. Evaluation
• User testing in Tallinn University: 4 courses running
• Think aloud usability testing

41. Future work
• Aggregating recent content from various Web 2.0
services
• Providing visualization widgets for external web
sites
• Archiving the course posts and comments

42. 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

43. Acknowledgements
This research was supported by European Social
Fund’s Doctoral Studies and Internationalisation
Programme DoRa
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44. ThankYou!
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