OUseful Info

Course Profiles Facebook App Update

I haven't posted about the OU Course Profiles Facebook app (did you know it got a Downesy? ;-), although Stuart and Liam have been posting updates, whilst Martin has been calling the demise of Facebook;-)

Anyway, Liam pushed a minor release to our 3,300 or so users last week, (with a major interface redesign on the way sometime soon, hopefully...?!;-)

The first thing to notice from this course profiles panel on Liam's homepage is that Course Profiles now lets users declare an OU qualification code. This was one of the most heavily requested features, so we are listening... :-)

You might also notice a further bit of personalisation on the Profile page display - the ability to set your own Course Profile banner message:

There's also been an addition to the course actions page for each course, in the form of course recommendations based on a "people who studied this course also studied..." principle:

I dabbled with a course recommendation code from the O'Reilly Programming Collective Intelligence book before the Christmas break, which seemed to work okay, but I'm not sure what  algorithm Liam is using. Now that the functionality is in place, we'll maybe start thinking about how to optimise the algorithm - if we can work out what behaviour we're trying to prompt... (Liam, I'm thinking we maybe need to add a tracking code on the recommendation URLs - e.g. &src=A103_ca_rec, or similar?)

It's encouraging to see that users are starting to engage with the course comments wall, too. Looking at the comments for A103, it's interesting to see a range of contributions, from old alumni, recent alumni (2007 presentation) and student's on the course that starts presenting in a week or two.

From chatting to one or two student and AL users of Facebook, the creation of groups for students yet to start a course, and wanting to meet-up with others who are also about to start the same course, is desirable (for some students). So it'll be interesting to see if the Find a Study Buddy utility gets much use over the next week or two, with the start of many courses due at the beginning of February.

One thing I hope to do over the next day or two is produce a report of Course Profiles activity for the course team of one of the more popular (and active) courses declared within the app, using both Course Profiles data (e.g. as shown here) and Google Analytics data, which we've been collecting for a while, but have only recently started looking at in any detail.

As with looking at Course Analytics, identifying sensible goals is an issue, but for starters I'm going with the course actions page (shown above) as well as clicks through to the comment wall and find a study buddy.

The OU web stats people are tracking clicks through to Openlearn materials for us, too, so all in all, we should have enough data to tell an interesting tale or two - and hopefully pick up a few clues about how the app is being used, and how we might improve it :-)

Blogged with Flock

Tags: facebook, course profiles

Posted by ajh59 at January 23, 2008 01:03 AM