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.
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.
Content in Impressory is tagged. For instance there may be a Video Lecture about Version Control. And students might want to hop from that to the Tutorial about Version Control, and to the solution. At the foot of each content entry, the tags describe what the content is about. Clicking these will bring up a list of all the other content in the course for that topic.
For more information, see tags
At the top of the feed, there are a set of controls that allow you to filter the content. For instance, easily finding content that has been added by staff rather than by students.
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.
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.
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.
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