EduFeedr blog

We have completed a bug fix release that solved several issues that we were known for a long time. EduFeedr 0.5.2 contains following changes:

• EduFeedr is now able to aggregate blog posts from WordPress categories and Blogger labels. This is important when people use the same blog in several courses. (#162)
• Participants list can be downloaded as CSV file. This is useful when a facilitator needs to grade the assignments. CSV file can be imported to Excel or other spreadsheet application as a table with all participants and grading column for each assignment. (#148)
• Incorrect blog URL’s are automatically fixed during the enrollment. (#163)
• Enrolling the same blog twice is not allowed. (#129)
• Course blog URL cannot be changed after creating the course. (#164)
• Several changes to how information is displayed in EduFeedr. (#134, #136, #149, #159, #165, #166)

This is our first release since October 2010. In the meanwhile our research group has been working with another software for managing blog-based courses — Dippler. In Dippler project we have taken more institutional approach on blog-based courses. Dippler has a central interface for managing courses and requires a special plugin in student WordPress. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. EduFeedr is more suitable for open courses where participants are not affiliated to one institution. We are planning to continue providing EduFeedr as a free service and do minor updates. However, we do not currently have a separate funding for continuing the development of EduFeedr.

Due to problems with spambots we have not reopened the registration form. Educators who are interested to use EduFeedr in their courses have to contact us to get a user account. So far EduFeedr has been used in more than 40 courses in Estonia, Finland, Spain and Portugal.

Recently we had to deal with a large number of spam bots that registrated to EduFeedr. Unfortunately there was no good way to separate real users from spam bots. In order to clean up the system we decided to remove all user accounts that were not facilitators in a course. This included also real people who had registrated to EduFeedr but had not created a course. All together we removed more than 70000 user accounts and only 41 accounts were left.

All the course data remained intact. Remaining users are able to continue using EduFeedr as before. Registration of new users is disabled until we have released a version update. Currently our developers are busy with other projects, so I am afraid that we are not able to release an update before the summer. Until then we can manually create user accounts for people who are interested to use EduFeedr as their course aggregator. If you need a user account in the system, please contact us by e-mail: hans.poldoja@tlu.ee.

In recent days a large number of spam bots have registrated to EduFeedr. We have disabled user registration until we are able to clean up the system. This should not affect the use of EduFeedr. In case you want to use EduFeedr as an aggregator in your course and need a user account, please contact us by e-mail (hans.poldoja@tlu.ee).

It is more than 5 months since we completed the previous release of EduFeedr. In recent months we have been busy with teaching and other projects. EduFeedr has been used for several courses in Estonia, Finland and Spain. There are several important limitations in the current version that we want to address with the upcoming releases. This posts summarizes the improvements that we have planned for version 0.6.

Aggregating post from one category/label

Current version of EduFeedr is not able to aggregate blog posts from a certain WordPress category or Blogger label. This limitation is not important when participants create a separate blog for each course. However, in Tallinn University our master students are using the same blog for several courses. In that case all the posts from their blogs are displayed on the course feed page. Facilitator can hide unrelated posts, but this requires a lot of manual work. We are currently working on the new discovery script that will be able to aggregate posts from a certain category/label.

Participant profile

Participant profile will include links to all blog posts and comments that the person written on the course. You can see the prototype of participant profile in ticket #156.

Connecting posts, comments and assignments

In order to link blog posts in student blogs with the assignments in course blog we ask course participants to include a link to the assignment in their blog posts. In reality only part of the students will include this link in their post. We are planning to add a select menu where the facilitator can choose the assignment and connect the blog post with that. You can see prototype in ticket #154.

In a similar way we are planning to connect comments with the person who wrote the comment (see prototype #155). These connections will be used for displaying comments in the participant profile.

Using a nickname

In some cases people prefer not to blog under their real name. If the participants wants her nickname to be displayed instead of real name she must enter her nickname and mark a checkbox in the enrollment form (see prototype #157). Logged in facilitator will still see her full name together with the nickname on course pages.

Combined RSS feed

We are planning to add two combined RSS feeds to the course feed page. One feed will include all the blog posts from the course and another will include all the comments (see ticket #158).

List of participants in CSV format

In some courses the facilitator has to give grades to the participants. Grading is complicated issue in a blog-based courses. EduFeedr doesn’t solve this issue because the students don’t have user accounts in our system. We are planning to provide CSV file with all participants and assignments. This file can be used in Excel or any other spreadsheet software to calculate points and grades (see ticket #148).

We are looking for your comments about these features and other critical issues that we should solve in the in the forthcoming releases.

Recording of the EduFeedr presentation from the Open Education Conference is now available in YouTube.