March 24, 2006
OU Course Catalogue Takes Lead from Amazon?
Whilst I was chatting to someone the other day about the OU courses page, where potential students can search through our course offerings, they mentioned that some of the pages now have links to taster material.
We've done this ourselves in Faculty hosted pages before (for example, here are some links to tasters for courses in the Relevant Knowledge Programme (I look after T184 :-)), but this was the first I'd heard of it being done on a more formal basis.
Here's how the link appears on the courses page for L310, a final year undergraduate equivalent French language course:
Look Inside the Course
Following the link takes you to a more detailed page that allows you to essentially leaf through the course - there's an a image of the course text, links to the course description and course guide, and of course links to sample course teaching materials as well as assessment materials.
So here then we essentially have a formalised way of presenting a 'look inside the course', which I think is an excellent idea.
Going back to the main courses page, there are a few other interesting things about it that have appeared over the last few months.
Required Books
Firstly, a list of the set books the student is required to purchase for the course:
Now I'm not sure where the information to generate this section of the page comes from, but it's exactly the sort of end point I had in mind for the OUseful booksearch web service (L310 on OUseful Books, or as RSS), so it would be interesting to see if that's the approach they went down (I suspect it isn't).
There are affiliate fees to be had here!
Course Reviews
A bit further down the page are a couple of course reviews.
These are pulled in from the course reviews site, where currently registered students can also submit reviews. (I'm not sure if this is locked down so that only students who have been registered as starting a course are allowed to post a review?).
One thing that appears to be lacking from the reviews are numerical/star ratings - I'd be interested to hear what factors were taken into account when that decision was made.
Students Who Studied This Course Also Studied...
This is an interesting section, and I'm not sure how it's created.
Elsewhere on the page are listings of the programmes/qualifications the course belongs to (so for example a student on a particular degree programme will have to take at least the set of courses that are required for that degree) and of course you'd expect a large overlap between the 'courses also studied' and the courses listed in a particular degree programme.
That's now of course.
It's rather a shame that 'people who studied this also studied that' technology is only now becoming useable in a scalebale way, becuase more and more the OU is moving to named degree programmes with specified course profiles.
Historically, the OU was a little bit more laissez faire and really pushed the 'Combined Studies' idea, in which students could - with guidance - create their own degree profiles (i.e. eassentially choose their own degree make-up).
If that was still the model in any significant sense, then making 'students who studied this also studied that' information would be one way of identifying student created emergent degree profiles (or degree pathways) that reflected student's course needs as perceived by them in volume.
Postscript
The new course pages have a lot in common with emerging models of e-tailing: 'look inside' features (i.e. browse the product), reviews, crowd preferences and so on. There isn't a chatlink or phonelink for a student to be able to chat to a course adviser yet, but maybe that's coming?
We do already sell gift vouchers for some courses, but these aren't electronic yet (I don't think you can redeem them as part of an online registration process, which is a shame). I don;t think the vouchers are available commercially yet, either, though I'd love to see one on Amazon!
And finally, as a URL hacker (that is, someone who uses URLs to navigate) there are a couple of things worth commenting on about this site. the course taster material for L310 appears at http://www.open.ac.uk/courses/tasters/l310/ which is all very sensible.
So sensible you might expect the course decription to live at http://www.open.ac.uk/courses/l310/:
Oops... the actual address is the far from friendly http://www3.open.ac.uk/courses/bin/p12.dll?C01l310 which really should be tidied up. (I always use a OUseful redirect: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/l310).
Posted by ajh59 at March 24, 2006 02:18 PM