By @mhawksey

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:

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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