Submissions/Designing Tools for Supporting Wikiversity Courses: the Case of EduFeedr


Information

This is an open submission for Wikimania 2010.


Title of the submission

Designing Tools for Supporting Wikiversity Courses: the Case of EduFeedr

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)

presentation

Author of the submission

Hans Põldoja, Teemu Leinonen

E-mail address or username (if username, please confirm email address in Special:Preferences)

hans.poldoja@tlu.ee , teemu.leinonen@taik.fi

Country of origin

Estonia, Finland

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)

Tallinn University (Hans Põldoja), Aalto University (Teemu Leinonen)

Personal homepage or blog

http://www.hanspoldoja.net

http://www2.uiah.fi/~tleinone/

http://flosse.blogging.fi

Abstract (please use no less than 300 words to describe your proposal)

In spring 2008 the authors organized a course on composing free and open educational resources (see http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Composing_free_and_open_online_educational_resources). It was officially a master’s course at the University of Art and Design Helsinki. The authors decided to make the course available with an open enrollment through the Wikiversity and promoted it in their blogs. As a result about 70 people from 20 countries signed up for the course on the Wikiversity page.

The course was organized as a weekly blogging seminar. In each week the facilitators posted a weekly theme and links to related readings on the course blog. The participants reflected on the weekly theme in their personal blogs and commented their peers.

One of the challenges in a large blog-based course is to follow all the communication. Typically this communication takes place not only in blogs but also in other environments such as Delicious, Twitter, etc. Most of these environments provide RSS feeds but typical RSS readers are not very suitable for following this kind of courses. Most of the RSS readers such as Google Reader are designed for personal use. In a Wikiversity course it would be important to have a shared feed reader that all the participants could use.

EduFeedr is a web-based feed reader that is designed specifically for following and supporting learners in open blog-based courses. The design process of EduFeedr is based on the research-based design methodology. We have organized several Wikiversity courses where we have tried out various online tools to manage the course. The initial user needs for EduFeedr came out from this contextual inquiry. Interaction design methods such as scenario-based design, user stories and paper prototyping have been used in the process.

As a result of the design process we have indicated the key features for EduFeedr. These include (1) signing up for the course, (2) visualizing how the students have proceeded with the assignments, (3) visualizing the social network between the students, (4) annotating blog posts and comments, and (5) archiving the course.

EduFeedr is currently a work-in-progress. The first version is implemented as Elgg plugin and we are currently doing internal testing with real data from several Wikiversity courses. In this version we have implemented signing up for the course and some of the planned visualizations. We are planning to launch the beta version of EduFeedr service in late summer 2010. The source code and more information about EduFeedr is available at the project web site (see http://www.edufeedr.org).

Track (People and Community/Knowledge and Collaboration/Infrastructure)

Knowledge and Collaboration

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

Teemu Leinonen will attend.

Slides or further information (optional)


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  1. Kocio 01:34, 4 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]