The Course Profiles application, which allows you to display a badge on your profile in Facebook about your Open University studies has just been updated. This is a bit of an interim release while we plan a brand new user interface that will enable users to connect with the application's features more easily. Not that this is some sort of dull maintenance release though, we've put in some new features!

If you haven't added Course Profiles to you Facebook account yet then you can find out more here.

Qualifications

We've added a facility to show your qualifications in a similar way to courses. You can now tell everybody what you are working towards.

People who studied this course also studied...

A very simple implementation of this idea has been put in. When you click on the title of a course in your course profile, you are taken to a list of functions available to you. Underneath this panel is a list that shows you what other courses are linked to this course. It isn't quite as complex or good as the method described in one of Tony Hirst's posts, but I have been reading some tutorials from the same book, so in future you never know. At the moment it just looks for the most commonly occuring course codes.

Make a statement!

In the Course Profiles panel on the user page, the second line always read "I am an OU distance learner!", now you can customise this line by going to "My Preferences".

News feed items

These will no longer just say "What OU courses have you studied?", but now a selection of messages will be displayed.

The team that developed this application are Tony Hirst, Stuart Brown, Martin Weller and myself. We're hoping to bring you many more features in this application and some completely new applications for Facebook during the course of this year.