Sketch of a cMOOC registration system

In CFHE12 Week 2 Analysis: Data! Show me your data and I’ll show you mine I highlighted some of the issues with collecting RSS feeds for participant blogs. The main issues are:

  • participant knowing their blog’s RSS feed
  • providing a feed filtered for a specific tag
  • data entry (missing http://, whitespace etc)
  • automatic registration of a feed with another system

This last one is very dependant on the system you are using for aggregating participant contributions. gRSShopper (developed by Stephen Downes) is an integrated solution whilst, as far as I’m aware, the FeedWordPress plugin used in ds106 and others requires some manual data entry, but bulk import is possible.
Before outlining my vision of a cMOOC registration system there is a basic decision about what you want to aggregate feeds on. Given the issue with getting Tag Feeds for a variety of Blogging Platforms I’m swaying towards asking participants to use a course identifier in each post title rather than as a tag/category/label. This make feed detection easier and whilst not familiar with the backend of gRSShopper think it would be a trivial bit of extra code and I’m already aware of extra plugins for FeedWordPress to filter posts. I will however provide outlines for both:

Registration flow with course posts by tag/category/label

Part of this is a modification of the existing registration process used in ds106.

  1. Optional: Ask user to generate a post in their blog with course tag (you could provide some set text advertising course)
  2. Enter details:
    1. name, social media accounts etc
    2. blog homepage
    3. blogging platform
  3. From blog url/platform display guessed (auto-detected) feed (if you’re using optional step this can be validated with auto-detection). If not a recognised blogging platform or tag/category/label feed not available instruct participant to include course tag in all post titles.
  4. Submit details

Registration flow with course posts by title

  1. Optional: Ask user to generate a post in their blog with course tag (you could provide some set text advertising course)
  2. Enter details:
    1. name, social media accounts etc
    2. blog homepage
  3. From blog url display guessed (auto-detected) feed (if you’re using optional step this can be validated with auto-detection).
  4. Submit details

Another aspect not mentioned here is letting the user edit their feed.
That’s my suggestion anyway. Your thoughts very welcome! BTW Yishay Mor at the OU has started thinking about the wider functionality of a cMOOC aggregation system.

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  • Stephen Downes

    A few points:
    First, on workflow, which is the topic of this post. Here’s how gRSShopper currently works. It’s more detailed than suggested above, but contains the same basic idea, with enhancements added through four years of experience running cMOOCs.
    For the participant:
    1. Go to the ‘add feed’ page. Eg. http://edfuture.mooc.ca/new_feed.htm
    2. If you are not logged in with a user account, log in – click on the link provided on the page, go to the login screen, then click on ‘return to where you were’ to return to the ‘add feed’ page.
    3. If you are not registered with a user account, create a user account – click on the same login link provided on the page, select the registration option, supply the information, click on ‘return to where you were. (I have found registration to be absolutely necessary, otherwise you get flooded with a slew of marketing feeds).
    4. Fill in the feed information on the page – feed name, URL, optional description. Submit, and you’re done.
    Note: feed information is updated from the RSS (or Atom) file. To edit feed information, edit the feed information at the source, and it is automatically changed in gRSShopper.
    For the feed administrator:
    1. Feeds submitted are set to ‘provisional’ status and won’t be harvested until reviewed. List the feeds, then click ‘approve’ to approve the feed. Optionally, run a test harvest for the feed. A significant number of these fail – that is why the ‘approve’ step is required. Note that (1) the harvester will correct for the most common feed errors: it attempts autodetect if the blog URL is entered, it adds http:// (or replaces feed://) as needed, it corrects for various feed formatting problems at the source.
    For the page designer:
    1. Items harvested from feeds can be displayed on a web page with a single ‘keyword’ command, eg. this command will include the feeds from the last 24 hours (truncating them at 500 characters): keyword db=link;expires=24;format=summary;truncate=500;all
    2. Pages may be optionally published as flat html, so they do not need to be generated dynamically from source each time a person lands on this (this gives a significant speed advantage); set ‘autopublish’ to a desired value (typically, once an hour).
    3. Pages may be returned into email newsletters; select that option and select an auto-send time (specify days of the week or month, time). When pages are set as email newsletters, they appear on the ’email newsletter’ list. Check the ‘default’ button if you would like new registrants to be automatically subscribed.
    For course participants:
    1. When registering, a list of newsletters is posted on the registration page, with default newsletters check (using a checkbox format). Check or uncheck desired newsletters. Subscription will be created with registration.
    2. Or, alternatively, after registration or login, click on ‘options’ (upper right of screen). The options page provides the following:
    – personal information, including email, which may be edited
    – list of feeds submitted, and their status
    – option to add social network information
    – list of subscribed newsletters, and an option to edit subscriptions
    That’s the entire workflow. The pages could be more beautiful and more interactive, but everything here described works pretty much without fail. I am of course open to ideas and suggestions.
    3. Or, alternatively, read the feeds on the website, either: (a) from the feedlist page (eg. http://edfuture.mooc.ca/feeds.htm and then http://edfuture.mooc.ca/feed/84 ) or (b) using the viewer: eg., http://edfuture.mooc.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?action=viewer
    4. Or, alternatively, from the feed list page, download the OPML and load the list of feeds on any other RSS reader. (eg. http://edfuture.mooc.ca/opml.xml )
    Second, on Yashay Mor’s post (it won’t allow me to comment there, so I’ll comment here): There are issues with gRSShopper, I would be the first to admit. But requiring root access to a web server (as stated by Yashay Mor) is not one of them. I have gone to considerable effort to include the code you need to run it on out-of-the-box Perl, whic means any person with a web site account could run gRSShopper.
    The more significant issue is that it is still difficult to install and run. I am working in an installer that greatly facilitates the process, but it’s buggy. I am also working on scripts that make it easier to run once installed.
    What would be ideal, of course, would be a hosted service that allowed people to simply open a gRSShopper account and start aggregating with a minimum of fuss. If someone provides me with start-up funding, I’ll provide that. (And no, my employer is not inclined to provide the time and space needed for such a project).

  • Martin Hawksey

    Hi Stephen,
    Thanks for elaborating on the process more. I feel the key here for me is to install gRSShopper and get a better idea of the flow. One quick question I have is what technique are you using to filter blog posts for the course? Are you using a combination of automatic filter by tag/title/post body combined with a little bit of manual curation?
    Martin

  • Pat

    Or set up one WP multisite blog?

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