The most recent edition of the student newspaper “The Collegiate” included a story about how students can now access alerts, notifications, and updates from their courses at GRCC without leaving the Facebook application. The article highlights GRCC’s use and deployment of Classtop’s CourseFeed and Blackboard’s Sync application.

Here is a video tutorial on how CourseFeed works with Blackboard:

Here is the full article:

Blackboard information accessed on Facebook
By Kyle A. Kiekintveld
Collegiate Staff Writer

Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook's annual developer conference F8

Facebook’s mega developer conference in San Francisco set the scene for the next 12 months of the social web. Mark Zuckerberg and team are setting the pace for how we interact with our friends online.

The main highlights:

• A mission about giving people the power to share, an ecosystem that will reward apps that help people share
• A set of ten core values for what an app should do: meaningful (social, useful, expressive, engaging), trustworthy (secure, respectful, transparent), well designed (clean, fast and robust)
• A verification and awards programme for great apps
• A way of logging on to existing web sites with your Facebook account so bringing your  details with you (photo, name etc) and seeing what your friends are up to on that web site (Facebook Connect) Read Om Malik on Why it matters and why Facebook will win for more.
  
• Lots and lots of excitement – the hype burn off that we’ve seen in London is definitely not here
• Increasing investment into app companies, especially those creating apps for students (fb fund recipients) as well as the usual suspects of travel apps, wish lists and games networks
• More improvements to the feed aggregation and story templates, new ways to view the feed – top stories, status updates, photos, posted notes and via the mini-profile. The feed is increasingly becoming central to the Facebook user experience – a bit as I predicted last year.
• Virtuous circle of sharing - the more people view stuff that people have shared the more likely they are to then share stuff themselves

Of the third parties I liked:

• Kontagent who have a really good tracking system for measuring cohort activity and A/B testing on Facebook apps.
• Flixster who have a solid money making business model paid for by the hollywood studios distributing blockbusters – their clients refreshingly were happy that users engaged with the product (viewed movie details, watched a trailer, added to want to see list) all within the platform and weren’t trying to count number of clicks to an external site
• CourseFeed – who were getting 30%-40% take up of their app within universities – by first signing up the university who then made it available to students. Shows the power of facebook within an enterprise context.

All in all, a useful conference: it was more to get inside the heads of the people building the platform, the sharing systems and how they are designing it. Understanding the thinking is very useful and will help me build better and more effective apps.

I didn’t get to meet Mark Zuckerberg unfortunately, but I did manage to meet his sister.. )

Toby Beresford and Randi Zuckerberg at F8

To kick off this blog I want to start by making an announcement about CourseFeed – the first social learning application that integrates Facebook with online LMSs (and students actually want to use it).

ClassTop, Inc. released a beta-test of its Facebook application called CourseFeed toward the end of October. The results of the test were surprising. At schools where CourseFeed was available, the students’ adoption rate was faster than any learning tool in the short history of online learning. At some schools over 20% of the entire student body joined in less than a week. Students love CourseFeed because it keeps them up-to-date on their online courses, connects them with classmates, and fosters collaboration; all within Facebook where they spend most of their time online. Schools that have single-sign-on environments became nervous about students entering their credentials in a 3^rd party system and some requested to be excluded from support by CourseFeed. That problem has been remedied.

The official release of CourseFeed comes with a building block that is loaded on the Blackboard server and does not require students to enter their credentials to work. For more information on how to get CoruseFeed please visit http://www.coursefeed.com/download.html.

Here are a few highlights:

- The building block never accesses user login credentials.

- School administrators have complete control to set up and administer access to the application.

- User privileges are restricted and only show student the courses and materials they already have access to on their school account. No one else on Facebook can see course related information.

- Content files are not stored in CourseFeed, but are simply web links back to the Blackboard server.

- The building block is free of charge.

I’d like to know your thoughts on this development in online learning. What’s valuable about social learning? What are the greatest challenges? There’s more to come!

Coursefeed har lansert en Facebook Applikasjon for studenter med tilgang til Blackboard. På Blackboard kan skoleadministrasjonen, forelesere og studenter dele informasjon med hverandre. Studentene kan laste ned kursinformasjon, forelesningsnotater eksamensoppgaver, studentaktiviteter og ta del i diskusjonsforum. Med Coursefeed kan informasjon på Blackboard bli oppdatert på Facebook sin news feed.

Foreløpig er denne applikasjonen bare tilgjengelig for noen utvalgte høyskoler og universiteter. Blant norske skoler har BI-studenter tilgang til Blackboard.

Skal studentene koble seg til Blackboard må de oppgi skolepassord og brukernavn. Legger du til Coursefeed vil slik sensitiv informasjon bli eksponert for Classtop, Inc. som har utviklet applikasjonen. Høres dette skummelt ut kan du lese sikkerhetsprosedyrene til Classtop, Inc. Er du fortsatt ikke avskrekket så besøk Coursefeed sin Facebook-profil og legg til applikasjonen. Send en melding eller spør på Discussion Board om din skole kan benytte seg av Coursefeed.