January 18, 2008
Yale OpenCourseware Feeds
Continuing the theme of feedifying open courseware from around the world (why they don't make RSS versions of courses available, I really don't know...), here's a proof of concept demo of using a handful of Yahoo Pipes and bit of OPML-bungle bundle [!;-)] generating PHP to get a feed based version of some of the Yale Open Courseware courses.
This work builds on my original demo of grabbing hold of the audio assets from a single Yale Open Courseware course.
There are actually several pipes involved in the above demo:
- Yale OCW courses: extracts a list of courses from the main Yale OCW courses page;
- Yale OCW Courses (Syllabus): extracts the sylabbus for a particular course;
- Yale OCW Courses (Class Sessions): extracts the list of sessions for a particular course;
- Yale OCW Courses (Single Class Session - Assets): extracts a list of media assets for a course;
- Yale OCW Courses (Single Class Session - Readings): extracts the list of readings for a course.
Unfortunately, the pipe that grabs the list of courses doesn't seem to be working propoerly - that is, it doesn't return all the courses on the course listings page. I can't see what the problem is offhand (I think it's a Pipes problem, dropping an href attribute when the page is originally scraped), but the demo is good enough to work as a demo...
...by which I mean, I tested the Pipes out on two of the courses during development, and it seems to work okay on a third :-)
There are still a few niggles with some of the regular expressions that extract the content for presentation. If you see anything that "looks wrong" in any of the feeds, please let me know where...
Here's an example, for example:
The id=secondHeaderLine"> bit shouldn't be there (but no time to fix it now....)
Anyway, bug fixes notwithstanding, the next stage is to feedify the full blown MIT opencourseware site, I guess?
For convenience, I've started keeping a single master list of OCW feedified courses.
At the moment, the only place I know that delivers OCW course content via feeds is OpenLearn. If you know of any others, please let me know.
See also:
- MIT open courseware for High Schools feeds
- UC Berkeley Youtube Video Playlist feeds
- MIT opencourseware course disaggregation - original proof of concept.
Brought to you by YAOUUP - Yet another OUseless, unfunded project...
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Tags: yale, ocw, opencourseware
Posted by ajh59 at January 18, 2008 10:10 AM