COURSE PROFILES - A Facebook Application for Open University Students and Alumni

Tony Hirst, Liam Green-Hughes, Stuart Brown, Martin Weller

May 2008

Background

 

Facebook is a social networking site with over 43 million active users. It began and expanded within a university environment and provides all universities in the US, UK and around the world with pre-existing Facebook networks waiting to be populated. 

 

Users who register on Facebook using email addresses ending @open.ac.uk are automatically made a part of The Open University Facebook network, which currently has over 4000 members. Individuals who do not register with an Open University email address can join the general Open University group, which has a membership of over 1000 members.

Any Facebook user can set up a group that other users can join. Recent weeks have shown a marked increase in the number of OU course related groups, as students seek to set up their own study communities in addition to - or away from - OU provided First Class conferences and Moodle forums.

At the start of November, Facebook opened up a service that allowed institutions and companies to have a profile on Facebook, of which users could become 'fans'. To date, over 1000 people have become fans of the Open University.

In Q2 2007, Facebook opened itself up as a 'platform' for which third parties could develop applications that could be embedded within users' personal profile pages. Since early September, a small, self-selected team of "Web 2.0 aware" OU staff have started to develop a suite of Facebook applications that are intended to probe ways of supporting OU students who make use of social networking sites in the context of their studies or other affiliation with the OU.

The first application - Course Profiles - was soft launched in early October, 2007, and currently has over 1500 users [UPDATE: Aug 2009 - 6,400 users, 270 active monthly users ]. The adoption rate was doubled in the second week of November from approx. 40-50 per day to approx. 80-100 per day by a news item to Student Home mentioning Facebook and the Course Profiles application. A second application - OpenLearn Course Units - provided a proof-of-concept embedding of OpenLearn unit content in Facebook via OpenLearn RSS feeds and a third party embeddable widget. A further application - My OU Story - will hopefully be launched by the end of 2007.

The Course Profiles Application.

Course Profiles was conceived as an application which allowed students to self-declare the OU courses they have taken and connect with one another on this basis.

The conceptual design was inspired by a premise that underpins many successful social tools, specifically that they should provide users with an immediate personal benefit, along with the potential for a social benefit that becomes increasingly powerful as the application uptake scales. To help grow the user base, the application should also be able to naturally benefit from viral, peer-to-peer, sharing growth.

Additional design criteria were based on observations that:

• OU students’ take pride in, and have a strong attachment to, the courses they have studied (often expressed by listing their completed courses in FirstClass signature blocks);
  
• Evidence from postings to the OU Network and the OU Group that OU students are trying to use Facebook to connect with other students on the same course;
• OU course codes have a high recognition value with the OU community, and are widely used as 'keys' in the URLs of many course related Open University web pages.
  

The application further plays on the fact that people like to use social networking profile pages to badge themselves, declare allegiance to particular courses, and even “show off” about their interests, within the context of well defined, and faithfully implemented, privacy limits.

Figure 1 - student comments on the OU Network Wall.

An important feature of many social applications is that the data produced by users of the application can be used to improve the performance of the application. This is particularly true of applications that make use of social recommendations ('users who bought/liked/did X, also did/bought/liked Y'). Collecting and exposing data that could be mined algorithmically, or used as the basis of sense-making visualisations, was identified as an important future-scaling factor, Such data could also be used to improve the usability of the application on the basis of evidence about usage and the user experience of the application, as well as indicating potentially fruitful areas of further development.

Finally, it was decided that the application should - in principle - be buildable by anyone. That is, privileged or authenticated access to OU systems would play no part in the features offered by the application, although we would make URLs linking in to OU systems trackable via a tracking code. Whilst the application is currently hosted on Open University servers, it could in principle be hosted anywhere.

In accord with the principles described above, personal benefit to users of the Course Profiles application arises from helping users to enrich their personal profile with a course profiles badge that lists their OU courses by course code and course title. The application optionally provides users with a social benefit that allows them to discover each other through that voluntary display of personal information, that is, through a shared declaration of their affiliation with a particular course. Viral growth is supported through the display of the Course Profiles badge on a user's personal profile page, as well as by providing users with the opportunity to invite friends they know are taking a course to add the application, or by recommending a course to them.

Users enter courses into the profile by course code, with the title being pulled in automatically from a database. The user can also optionally declare the year and even presentation month when they studied (or intend to study) each course. Application users are self-selected and their course codes are self-declared - no checks are made in official records to see that these declarations are accurate.


The Course Profiles application has been designed to allow rolling increments to its functionality - it is very much a 'perpetual beta'. Recent releases of the application have included the addition of links to OU courses and qualifications web pages and related OpenLearn materials, where they exist, the ability to see which of a users' friends have also studied a particular course, and a course comment 'wall'.

Whilst the application has been designed around OU course codes, it is in principle scaleable to other institutions. To demonstrate this, an update to the application allowed users to add OpenLearn unit codes to their profile; these entries are then distinguished from full OU units by an accompanying OpenLearn logo (see appendix 1, figures 2 and 3).  The application therefore allows, in principle, the declaration of courses from different institutions, as identified by their logos. Requests for this sort of functionality have already been received from existing users.

 

Figure 4 - a complete Course Profiles course listing. Note the declaration of OpenLearn units.

How the application works

 

Once a user has added a set of OU course codes to their profile, the application allows users to click on the title of a course and access the course actions panel.

 

The actions panel offers six course-related options (four if the course is no longer running):

 

1) Course details provides a link through to the OU Courses and Qualifications page for that course (where it exists) on the OU website. A tracking code is attached to the URL allowing us to monitor usage and user journeys through the OU website.  Possible integration with an affiliate marketing scheme may be considered going forward. OU web statistics show that traffic is being generated by the application towards the Courses and Quals site.

2) Your friends on this Course is a list of your Facebook friends who have installed the Course Profiles application and have also declared this particular course on their profile. We use a standard Facebook display to list these friends, so you can view their profile, poke them or message them, for example.

3) Find a new study buddy is a friend discovery service that helps you find new friends who have also declared this course in their Course Profile. Careful consideration of privacy issues means that users can set a range of privacy settings in the application preferences.

4) Recommend to a Friend is an easy way to invite someone you know to look at a course. It generates a message, along the lines of “Joe Smith has recommended “T123 Isn’t technology fun” to you using Course Profiles! Go to Course Profiles now to view the recommendation, find study buddies and try some free related materials from OpenLearn. They said: "Hi Sam – check this out, just your sort of thing..."”.  Users can customise the italicised text.

5) The OpenLearn panel locates OpenLearn units derived from the course the user is interested in.  Again tracking codes monitor usage of this service and evidence suggests a small of of traffic is being sent to the OpenLearn site from the Facebook application.

We know through discussion with the OU Library that the OU is often contacted by students wishing to access course material in advance of the mailing date in order to prepare themselves for study.   Users of Course Profiles are automatically offered this option via OpenLearn.

6) The Course Comment Wall is place where application users can write comments about the course.

 

Some early findings

By mid November (after just four weeks of official listing) over 1500 people were using the application.

It is not clear where the saturation point of uptake will lie, nor what distribution of users we currently have across members of the OU network, members of the general OU Group (but not the OU Network), fans of the OU corporate profile, and so on. If OpenLearn starts to promote the Course Profiles application and encourage its users to declare the OpenLearn courses they are studying, we will also need to start segmenting out that population of users within the headline reports.

An open research question relates to the way in which declarations of all relationship types with the OU are distributed across the Course Profiles user base, and how flows might be managed between them. For example, should we try to convert OU network members to OU fans? Should OU fans be encouraged to install the Course Profiles application? And so on. In the widest sense, how might Facebook be used to support the recruitment and retention of current and future OU students, as well as providing a legacy community for OU alumni?

[date is start of September to November 18th 2007]

Figure 6 - chart showing the growth in number of Course Profiles users.

This success has been the result of addressing a particular need, successful experimentation with the viral forms of marketing afforded by Facebook and the use of `Facebook Flyers’ which represent more traditional forms of web advertising.  Further viral growth is anticipated and an upcoming feature on the application in Sesame should further boost numbers.

 

We also know that so far there have been 748 visits to the OU courses and qualifications site and 144 visits to OpenLearn trough the application.  As a result there have been three registrations to OU courses with an equivalent value of £1,445.00.

 

User feedback has been extremely positive, for example:

“I think it's a great application - being able to find a list of fellow students on the same course is a feature that was always missing from FC (and of course with the client not having been developed by the OU, not something you guys could really do much about!), and so this definitely plugs a hole.

It would be really cool if the OU could now make students aware of its existence & associated benefits/features, so that more sign up to FB, install the app and so make the app even more useful.”

 

Data Mining

An important aspect of any web development is the way in which user data can be mined to improve the usability and development of the application and segment potentially conflicting user groups. Coming to some sort of understanding about the elements required for an effective analytics strategy for social applications is one of the drivers of the Course Profiles application development. The first phase is to understand what data is available, and how we might start to segment it.

All the Course Profile data has been volunteered by unverified, self-selecting application users, and as such should not been considered authoritative. The following charts are based on the data provided by approximately 700 users of the Course Profiles application at the start of November 2007. If nothing else, the data displayed suggests that potentially sensitive aggregated data can be collected by third parties within the context of a public, social application.

Correlating the data collected via the Course Profiles application with 'official' OU data sets would help us identify the extent to which the demographic of OU Facebook users is normal compared to the full OU population, and as such to what extent lessons learned from student uptake of the Course Profiles application might generalise across the OU as a whole, or indicate trending away from the current norms.

Note that the display of data aggregated across the whole Course Profiles userbase is not in itself necessarily useful. Where the data becomes powerful is in the way it may be segmented and then used as the basis of more specifically targeted reports, or even social recommendation systems.

So for example, it's easy enough to mine Course Profiles data to see how courses that students have declared are clustered:

 

Note that the graphs displayed below are solely intended to be indicative of the sorts of reports that we can trivially generate today and that can then be used to act as tangible prompts for the sort of questions we might be able to ask of the data collected as it becomes more substantial.

Example reports:

- what is the distribution of courses declared across the Course Profiles userbase?

- how are declared courses distributed across calendar years?

- what are the relative number of declarations across completed, current and future uptake of courses by level across each Faculty?

What is the distribution of courses declared across the Course Profiles userbase? It is important to bear in mind that courses can be declared in three ways - completed courses, courses currently being taken, courses under consideration for future study. A more informative chart might separate course uptake for each of these three types of course declaration.

A summary bar chart of the number of courses declared by users. Again, a more informative chart might distinguish between the numbers of people declaring past, current and future course intentions.

The Course Profiles application development began with an informal conversation between an AACS developer (Liam Green-Hughes) and an OU academic (Tony Hirst) about what might make for the simplest possible OU student-centric social network application. An externally hosted prototype application was developed over 3 weeks in August-September 2007 and a member of the OU comms team (Stuart Brown) was brought in to provide additional expertise on the development of the application. The core, prototype personal application (the course profile badge) was 'advertised' to half-a-dozen or so OU staff and ALs in mid-September, and then to a couple of students, for comment. A member of IET (Martin Weller) joined the core development team as institutional champion and led a development strand to identify additional possible Facebook applications. As user numbers started to grow slowly through random discovery (1 or 2 additions per day), a second 'development version' of the application was created to guarantee that users would not be exposed to the rapidly evolving prototype. The 'live' application was moved to an OU server, and a second release of the application that included the Course Actions page (without the OpenLearn and Comment Wall functionality) was pushed at the start of October. In mid-October, the Course Comment Wall and Related OpenLearn Units panels were added to the Course Actions page. In late October, the ability to add OpenLearn unit codes was added.

Communication between the core design team has to date been dominated by email exchanges, often several per day, seven days per week, since the start of September. All the code has been produced by the single developer. The process has been agile, with features negotiated and selected equitably amongst the core team, additionally informed by user feedback. One or two bugs have escaped into the wild, where they have been promptly and openly fixed. Where a user has reported a bug, they have been personally contacted and included in the fixing process.

OpenLearn Units in Facebook

The OpenLearn Units in Facebook application uses a third party RSS feed displaying widget (Grazr) to display OpenLearn unit content RSS feeds. The RSS feed URLs for every OpenLearn Unit are collected by OpenLearn topic area in a single OPML feed which is subscribed to by the embedded widget. In this way, a user who has embedded the application can view all the content from any OpenLearn unit via a single Facebook application.

Using the same rapid application development technique - that is, embedding a Grazr widget subscribed to an OU controlled web feed - a proof of concept OBU widget has been produced that allows the user to listen to OU/BBC audio content and read related OpenLearn content from within Facebook.
One attractive feature of the Grazr widget as used in these applications is that it can be embedded in any web page by any user. That is, a user of this Facebook application could use it to embed OpenLearn content in their own website. Since these two applications were released, a proof-of-concept OU branded Grazr widget has been obtained which additionally provides a link back to the OU from the widget chrome.

However, the content embedding applications in themselves are not particularly useful. That is, as they currently stand, they do not sit particularly well within the context of a personal profile page on a social network. It may be that by integrating this sort of content embedding within a Course Profiles-like context, it would become relevant to the daily actions of a user, but that is not clear at the moment.maybe make a comment here about the personal/social/viral payoff model? and extend the model to include some sort of relevance/context attribute? -Tony 19/11/2007 10:59

Other Facebook Applications in Development

The Course Profiles team are developing a pipeline approach to the development of additional Facebook applications.

Before reviewing the applications under development, it is important to understand the reasons behind taking such an approach.

Firstly, for wide uptake of any application, it must be immediately obvious what the direct personal benefits are to the user, and how social benefits might arise. Simplicity of use is an important part of this. Feature bloat adds complexity to the user interface and loses - in the eyes of the user - clarity of purpose. Providing separate applications allows each one to do its job well.

Secondly, by developing multiple applications, we can explore API development, and other interoperability issues between applications that might share certain sorts of data - such as details of friendship networks, or courses declared by a user. The option of developing a meta-application offering a plug-in framework to each of the separate applications is also available.

Thirdly, developing separate applications means that additional developer effort can be brought in to look after individual applications, rather than throwing multiple developers at the same application if additional effort is required.

Fourthly, the design of upcoming applications can be informed by lessons learned from the development of previous applications.

And finally, older applications can continue to evolve their core features, whilst applications that do not appear to be useful can be dropped from the development pipeline.

Upcoming Applications

My OU Story is a ‘richer profile’ application, or more specifically a ‘richer status’ application. This application will allow users to post stories about their OU life, and in addition set an emotional status indicator to express their mood about the issues contained in the post.

The intention behind the application is to provide a 'personal journal' facility at the individual/personal benefit level, and help establish a mutual support network at the social level. For example, if a user posts a 'grumpy' emotional status and says they are feeling down other users are notified of this and can offer support. A graph displaying a student's mood over the duration of a course will also provide a visible trace of their emotional journey through a course.

This application will provide an easy way for students to put out a call for help enabling the kind of peer support seen on FirstClass, which anecdotally suggests that peer support can play a vital role in retention by helping students complete their course.

At a technical level, the application will provide an early opportunity to explore interoperability with the Course Profiles application, by sharing information from that application about a user's declared courses, and sharing back posts to the course comment area (subject to appropriately set privacy controls).

At an aggregated data level, the emotional data (which is mapped to a linear 'happiness scale') might be used to identify particularly stressful times within a course presentation, such as the lead up to assessment due dates, or particularly difficult or problematic areas of the course.

OU Resources is a service which exposes course related resources to a user. For example, the set books that a student must buy for a particular course, links to Facebook groups related to a course, and maybe even OU First Class course conferences and Moodle VLE pages for courses in presentation. This application will enable us to explore sustainability issues, even in a very small way.  For example, Amazon affiliate fees can be from sales on Amazon that result from us linking from an identified course book on Facebook to the appropriate book page on Amazon (any revenues will be donated to the OU Foundation).

The mid-term plan for this application will provide a service that will enable students who have gone from ‘currently taking’ a course to ‘have completed’ a course (as listed in Course Profiles) to offer their books for sale – with a single click – on the Facebook marketplace.  Referrals could also be made between students who are about to begin a course and those who are about to finish a course and may therefore have relevant books to sell.

In addition to automatically identified resources (leveraged by course code), this application will also explore the potential of collecting and sharing user-submitted links in a similar way to the fOUndit pilot currently being explored by John Woodthorpe in the Faculty of Maths, Computing and Technology.

Summary

Three desirable characteristics have been identified for a successful social application, specifically: an obvious personal benefit, a increasing social benefit as more people use the application, opportunities for viral distribution. To these we might also fourth characteristic, contextual relevance. Some form of 'traditional' communication means to raise initial awareness of the application and bootstrap the viral distribution model is also required. A robust data collection and analysis strategy provides an evidential basis for improving the usability of the application, identifying potential new features, and opening up the possibility of automated social recommendation processes. Finally, it is important to acknowledge the importance of the agile development process behind the application, as well as the recognition of its perpetual beta status by the development group and the application's users alike.

The Course Profiles application, in which users can record and display the OU and OpenLearn courses they have taken, are taking or intend to take, and then optionally discover other users who have declared similar courses, was designed with these three main characteristics in mind. Between the start of October, 2007 and mid-November, 2007, the Course Profiles Facebook application attracted 1,500 users.

A second, 'rich, emotional status' application - My OU Story - has been designed according to similar principles as the Course Profiles application, and will be launched before the end of 2007.