Newsfeed¶
Most days, the first place students will visit is the newsfeed. This shows the most recent content that has been published in your course — including polls, videos, news posts, lecture presentations and wiki pages. Students can interact with much of the content directly from the newsfeed.
As you might expect, it looks fairly like a typical social media activity stream.
Filtering the feed¶
The newsfeed can be filtered, making it easier to find content on a particular topic, to find all the lectures, or content that’s been added by staff rather than students.
Content in Impressory is tagged. For instance there may be a Video about Version Control. And students might want to hop from that to the Tutorial about Version Control. At the foot of each content entry, the tags describe what the content is about. In the newsfeed, clicking on a tag will filter the feed to show just content with that tag. For instance, click on a Lecture tag, and only the Lectures will be shown. For more information, see Tagging.
Comments and voting¶
Comments and voting are, of course, shown directly under each item on the newsfeed. We include downvoting as well as upvoting, as it’s as important to hear what students struggled with — a strongly downvoted item is a good hint that there may be a lot of valuable feedback in the comments.
Coming soon: Q&A¶
If a content item is marked as being a question, then students can reply to it. Both the question and the replies can be commented on and voted on. This produces a conversation that is very much like the conversations on Q&A sites like Quora or StackOverflow or that you would find in many MOOC platforms. But unlike those platforms, in Impressory this discussion is not hived away in some separate “discussion” area that many students might never visit, but takes place front-and-center on the newsfeed. Discussion is not a second-class citizen in the course, but a core part of the interaction alongside the content.
It also means you can include video questions (or video replies).
Coming soon: Settings¶
On the right hand side of each content entry, there are a set of controls. These allow you to edit many of the settings for the content entry directly from the newsfeed. For instance, editing its tags, setting it to “show first” (be the first page returned when a topic is looked up), and whether it is marked to appear in the newsfeed and the index.
Coming soon: Pushing the feed to Facebook¶
Very often students will set up a Facebook page for a course – a place where they can converse away from the prying eyes of the teaching staff. However, if sharing happens only on the Facebook page, it is less useful for the course. Facebook does not provide learning analytics, or convenient linking between content that might be on the same topic.
Our planned solution for this is to integrate with Facebook, so that when a user adds content, then if they have linked their Facebook account, Impressory will post it as a story onto their wall or a Facebook page. This allows students to converse and commune on Facebook, while still bringing them back to Impressory to interact with the content. That way the course still gets the analytics and feedback, and the students get the convenience of the topic-tagging when it comes to revision.
Coming soon: Pushing the feed to Twitter¶
If a student links their Facebook account, when an item of content is added, it’ll be possible to tweet it over Twitter with a course hashtag.