This document proposes the conceptual design of EduFeedr, an educationally enhanced mash-up tool for aggregating and visualizing learning activities across various web applications in open online courses. It describes the need for such a tool to address limitations of standard RSS readers. The design is based on prototyping, participatory design sessions, and scenario-based evaluations. Key proposed features of EduFeedr include aggregating student blog posts and comments, visualizing participation and connections between students, and allowing teachers to provide feedback. The document concludes by outlining future work to develop user interfaces and choose an open-source platform.

1. Conceptual Design of EduFeedr
— an Educationally Enhanced
Mash-up Tool for Agora Courses
Hans Põldoja, Mart Laanpere
Tallinn University

2. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California,
94105, USA.

3. Introduction

7. MOOC?

8. Agora course

9. Photo by Zouzou Wizman,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/
zouzouwizman/12129001/

10. Characteristics of Agora
courses
• openly accessible content
• open personal learning environment
• free and open registration for participation

11. Learning environment

12. Learning content
link and tag
Course wiki and blog
link and tag link
link link
Student blogs
RSS

13. Aggregating News Feeds in
Mash-up Learning Environments

16. Problem

17. Problem
Standard RSS readers lack the features for
monitoring and analyzing learning activities which
cross the borders of different Web 2.0 applications.

18. Conceptual Design of
EduFeedr

19. Methods
• Lightweight prototyping
• Scenario-based design
• Participatory design sessions

20. Prototyping a course
database with Bento

23. Requirements

24. Requirements
• support for all major blogging platforms using open
standards (RSS, Atom, trackback, pingback)
• no special plug-ins should be reuquired on the student
blogs
• the scope of EduFeedr is limited with aggregating and
annotating the feeds from both teacher’s and students’
PLE’s and visualizing the process of knowledge building
• only teacher has an user account in EduFeedr, which allows
her to modify the EduFeedr settings
• anyone has read access to aggregated course content

25. Scenario-based design

26. Scenarios
• First experience with EduFeedr
• Student is posting an assignment on her blog
• Exploring the connections between student blogs
• Setting up course feeds
• Archiving course posts and comments
• Using the offline client

27. Scenario 3: Exploring the connections between student blogs
John has been using EduFeedr for a few weeks. For him the most
exiting feature is the way how connections between the blogs
are presented. EduFeedr has a visualization where all the
blogs are displayed as nodes. Lines between the nodes show the
links between the blog posts. All the students have linked to
the course blog. Some of the student blogs have a lot of
connections while others have not been so active.
It is possible to switch on a different view and see who has
commented which blog. This time John finds out that some
student blogs have actually more comments than his blog.
The same information is also displayed as a table where it is
easy to see how many pingbacks and comments each participant
has made. EduFeedr has also aggregated all the comments. It
means that John can see all comments that one student has made
on a same page without visiting all the blogs. This will save
him a lot of time, because commenting is part of his grading
scheme and students get points for that.

28. Validating the scenarios
• Mozilla Foundation / Creative Commons open
education course
• Two design sessions

29. Key features of EduFeedr
• Aggregating blog posts and comments from student
blogs
• Displaying the progress of all the participants, possibility
to filter and browse blog posts by a certain assignment
• Displaying the social network between the student
blogs
• Teacher can write memos/comments about the blog
posts
• Archiving blog posts and comments from student blogs

30. Connecting student posts with
the assignment
• Three approaches
• By time
• By tag
• By link
• Blogger does not support pingbacks, can be solved
by a special script

31. Conclusions and Future
Work

32. Conclusions and Future Work
• User stories and UI mockups are currently in
progress
• Choosing a suitable open-source development
platform
• More information: http://www.edufeedr.org

33. Thank You!
• hans.poldoja@tlu.ee
• http://www.slideshare.net/hanspoldoja/