December 10, 2007
Course-Listing Tools Hit Facebook
Earlier this year Facebook removed one of its few academic-minded features — a tool that let college students list which courses they were taking. Some users might have taken that removal as a sign that the social-network was moving ever further away from its collegiate roots. But in fact, Facebook officials simply hoped that someone would build a better course-management application than they had.
A company named Inigral thinks it’s done just that: Its designers have built an application, called Courses, that lets students use Facebook to track down classmates, share notes, start discussion groups, and keep track of their coursework.
Sounds promising, right? Well, there’s something of a catch. Now that Facebook has opened up its pages to independent software developers, there are plenty of course-listing applications like this one floating around. And none of those tools seem especially popular: According to VentureBeat, the most widely-used course-listing tool has less than 3,300 “daily active users.” Applications like Courses might be useful, but their success will depend on whether students decide that Facebook is an academic tool, not just a social one. —Brock Read
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The stalkers will like that!
— md Dec 10, 05:36 PM #
Ah, and there’s always FERPA, too!
— Bill Sodeman Dec 10, 05:56 PM #
Presumably these tools are based upon what the student lists as courses they are taking. I fail to see how FERPA becomes an issue. The law doesn’t prohibit the student from releasing this information.
— Another Bill Dec 11, 07:01 AM #
uh-oh. next step, an alternative course management app for faculty?
— artemis Dec 11, 08:58 AM #
I was disappointed when facebook took away their course tool. Now that I hear their reason I’m even more annoyed. Just as this mini-article states, there are now multiple course tools, and there’s no standard among them. If you use one tool and your friend uses another, you can’t see each other’s courses. This is why I stopped listing my courses altogether, as I believe others have done.
— facebook veteran Dec 11, 09:07 AM #