Facebook delivers (literally) with CourseFeed
Merry Christmas! Happy Birthday! No. Wrong holidays. So what is is that I'm looking for here? Oh, that's right - Happy CourseFeed Day! What is CourseFeed, you ask? Well, it's one of the first Facebook applications that I find exceptionally useful in an academic environment.
As a student who used Blackboard®, it was brought up more than once that we needed a way to find out when our course information was being updated - whether it was an announcement by a professor, a new posting to a discussion board, etc. I used to think having an RSS feed to Blackboard® would be an awesome idea. I waited and waited for Blackboard® to develop some sort of way to update students when new postings went on their course pages. It never happened. Well, Blackboard® never made it happen. Guess who did though? Facebook and its fabulous ability for people to develop applications to work with the social networking site. Thanks to ClassTop for developing this one!
So, on this fabulous Tuesday, I leave you with my best find of my first blogging year: CourseFeed. Below is the description as it appears on Facebook; read it, get as excited as I did, and then go check it out! From CourseFeed:
CourseFeed connects you with your classmates and connects you to Blackboard®. Browse your courses, post messages to the class, share notes – all without ever leaving Facebook. CourseFeed also alerts you when your professor posts announcements, tests, or content to Blackboard. And you’ll get alerts when classmates post to the course wall and share notes.
Privacy policy is here.
If your school doesn’t have Blackboard don’t worry - use CourseFeed to hook-up with classmates, collaborate, and share. See features below!
Features Without Blackboard:
* Course Wall
* File storage for Course Notes, etc.
* Course feed display of what's new posted by others.
* Connect with others in the course.
* Profile display to let friends know when you're in class.
Additional Features With Blackboard:
* See everyone in your course – guaranteed accurate course roster.
* View all Blackboard course materials without leaving Facebook
* Course feed shows when professor posts announcements, files, etc. to Blackboard.
* View all announcements, new or old, in the announcements area.
* One-click access into Blackboard and auto-navigation that takes you right to the item. No hunting!
As you can imagine, this is an awesome undertaking. Please report any problems using the discussion board area and we'll do our best to resolve them.
Please share this with your friends and classmates.
5 comments:
This almost makes me want to take courses again! I wonder if Albany uses Blackboard?
I believe that Albany is currently using WebCT but in the plans of retiring that after FA 07 and converting to Blackboard in the Spring.
Since I have posted I've been watching the discussion boards for the CourseFeeds app and have noticed security concerns from system administrators at many schools. It's a very interesting discussion.
Bridget mentioned "security concerns" some school administrators have with CourseFeed. These concerns had to do with CourseFeed storing user names and passwords for students. In response to these security concerns CourseFeed has just released a new way for school admins to deploy CourseFeed that does not require a user to hand over their login credentials. Any school interested in testing/using the new method can go here to download it: http://www.coursefeed.com/download.html
Thanks for the nice post!
Thanks for the update, Eric. This is great news!
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