December 12, 2007

Funded Facebook Course Apps

A couple of 'institutional' people have picked up on the Venturebeat reported story that a Facebook education app gets funding inside the OU and posts have also appeared about it elsewhere:

Inigral, a company behind a Facebook application called Courses, has raised slightly more than half a million in a round led by The Founders Fund, according to VentureWire.

Courses lets you find others in your college classes, then share notes with them, start a forum discussion, do a video chat and more. You can also keep track of assignments, upload your own notes and manage your course activities.


You can see reports on some of these education apps on Facebook via Adonomics (thanks to Stuart for the original screenshot):

The app mentioned in the Venturebeat story is Courses.

I posted a couple of chaser comments about the story, which I'll summarise them here 'for my own record':

The avenue we're keen to explore [with Course Profiles] is the extent to which 'public' social networks can be used to provide additional forms of support for our home study students, who are spread across the UK (and indeed, across the world). [In this sense, Course Profiles is (currently) an instituion specific application.]

So as with the other apps, we support 'find a study buddy' functionality, 'friends on a course' and course comment walls.

We're also offering support in the app for people taking OpenLearn open educational courses so you can add an OpenLearn course unit to your profile if you want to. Again, the idea here is to help broker social networks amongst learners where physical colocation is all but ruled out, unlike the situation in trad universities where you sit in lectures with your peers.

One of the the things we are looking at with our app are ways of making it a little bit stickier. Just listing courses is something that will take you to the app once per course. Building some sort of weekly (or even daily) use case around the app is a whole other issue.

One thing we are wary of doing with the app is intruding on the student's social space; so finding useful things for users to do in the app without making it seem like we are forcing VLE functionality into Facebook is one of the thing's we're thinking around...

At the moment, our daily users are running at about 5% on a userbase of 2,400. With approx 50 adds a day accounting for 2% of daily users, that means we have 2-3% daily active users. I don't know that really means though.

[So how much activity should we expect in the app, if we want to claim it is 'successful'?]

- Adding a course to the profile is something you do once.
- Looking for a study buddy on a course maybe something you do a handful of times.
- Commenting on a course maybe something you do regularly IF the comment wall takes on the role of an active FB group for a course, or if it takes over part of the role of the 'official' course (or alumni) conference.
- Using the 'friends on a course' area as a place for communicating with friends (like a cut down address book) is something you might do regularly (err???? ;-)

The way we're thinking about the app in its current form, it's hard to see why daily use rates would be that high at all?

And bear in mind that if you max out on average at one or two weekly visits for the duration of the course, this would only give 1/7 = 14% daily active users...

So maybe 3% active for course profiles isn't that bad?

Although Course Profiles was started as an unofficial, skunkworks app, and largely continues as such, the app has been mentioned in several official channels, with a news item on students' "Student Home" webpage, a mention on the Open University profile page on Facebook, and plugs in both Open House, the internal staff magazine, and Sesame, the student and alumni magazine (download avalailable: "Show us your face!" p32).

Finally, I picked up on another UK HEI use of Facebook from a sideways mention by IT Professional of the Year, BriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiIIIIIIIIIIIIIAN KELLY): in particular, the "pilot [use of a] Facebook group for students on our [Oxford] short online courses" (Dave White, "Reaching into the Web").

There's quite a bit of relevant discussion behind the decision to use a Facebook group on their project wiki.

We've started discussing potential "issues" we might get into if we start recommending that students use Facebook groups, or the Course Profiles app course comments walls, in any sort of "official" way (direct, implied or otherwise), so it'll be interesting to see whether the Oxford discussions have mirrored our own...

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Posted by ajh59 at December 12, 2007 09:10 AM
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