OUseful Info

OpenLearn RSS - Feed Your Mind

A couple of weeks ago, the OpenLearn team released a host of OpenLearn related RSS feeds as part of the latest release of the OpenLearn environment.

OpenLearn "Course Unit List By Topic" Feeds

This widget can be used as a navigation scheme for the OpenLearn units as this simple demo shows: Navigating OpenLearn Units using Grazr.

As well as topic level feeds (that is, feeds containing a list of units in each topic area), an All OpenLearn Units feed is also available.

For convenience, I have bundled the topic feeds into a single OPML feed available from here: OpenLearn Courses OPML

An OpenLearn search GrazrScript OPML feed is also available. (Until such a time as the OU search engine support OpenSearch RSS results, this uses a Dapper application to generate the results feed by screenscraping!)

For completeness, here's a literally combined OpenLearn Units and OpenLearn Search GrazrScript OPML feed. This is the one that is used in the above demo.

OpenLearn Unit Content Feeds

Far more exciting, to my mind at least, is the release of RSS versions of each of the OpenLearn course units (this is still rolling out).

Here's an example: a course unit on Babylonian mathematics (via RSS).

You can find the full list here: OpenLearn Units and thier RSS unit content feeds.

The feeds are also reachable from each course unit landing page (example):

Unfortunately, the feeds I tested don't appear to working in Grazr at the moment, so I can't embed a demo. [UPDATE: all the OpenLearn unit content feeds now seem to be working properly :-)]

BUT - by making these feeds available, the potential for "feedlearning with OpenLearn" is significant.

There are still one or two issues around relating to the addressing of course units and feeds - at the moment you can't obtain (or even generate) a list of course content feed URLs from the unit listing feeds, but hopefully that will be addressed by the next push of the unit listing feeds (maybe by adding a numeric location/reference code element in the metadata?). [UPDATE: solved; for example, here's an OPML file that points to unit content feeds for the Science and Nature units: Science and Nature Unit Content Feeds (OPML Reading List). HOWEVER, the OpenLearn unit content RSS is not liked - at the moment - either by Grazr or Optimal browser... it seems to work okay in a browser though?; I haven't tried it yet in an online feed reader...]

OpenLearn XML Feeds

Finally, its worth mentioning that the XML 'source' files for OpenLearn Units are now available via a URL. That is, there is no longer a requirement to download the XML in a zipped file bundle.

With mashup services such as IBM's DAMIA accepting XML input, it will be interesting to see whether improving the availability of the raw XML in this way encourages people to play with it...

Posted by ajh59 at September 7, 2007 09:47 AM