The “SFU Courses” Facebook application has been up and running for about two semesters now. It ended up working just about like I imagined in my original plan: data comes from the goSFU database, and students can publish an automatically-updated list of their courses on their profile page.
Getting the data took a little political wrangling, but ended up happening without too much trouble. Thanks go out to Richard MacLeod, the Director of Records and Registration, for running interference for me a couple of times when administrators got wind of this and fully misunderstood what it did. The consensus now seems to be that this is a legitimate thing to do with University data, as long as students give permission properly. For the first semester, I was half expecting the President to summon me to his office for a beating at any moment.
The data feed that I eventually got is a little circuitous. Of course, it starts with the live goSFU database. That database is replicated in real time to a backup server. The almost all of the data on the backup server is copied nightly to the “reporting database” that is used for all of the University’s reporting and data analysis stuff. The reporting database is used to feed a legacy database called “AMAINT” that is still used by several older systems around campus. The CS tech staff get a view into AMAINT that runs Gradebook, etc. I have a view to that which is used to update the application’s database.
Miraculously, all of that usually works and I get data that’s updated daily. This is used to update everybody’s profile box every morning with their most current course list.
In previous semesters, I haven’t received upcoming semester data during the registration period. This semester, Nathan from our tech staff got me summer courses almost as soon as registration started, so people could see courses as registration was happening.
There are currently about 1800 Facebook users who have added the application, and 1600 who have also authenticated as SFU users and authorized the relevant data release. The 200 person difference is curious: the application will do absolutely nothing for you if you haven’t agreed to release your SFU data. I have no idea who those 200 people are, or why they have the application.
Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the whole thing, particularly with the number of users. That’s something like of 10% of all SFU students. I can’t think of any other (optional) service the University has for students that has that kind of uptake rate. Maybe residence or orientation?
Anyway, I accomplished my goals: learn the Facebook API, make the University seem a little cooler, give students access to their own data in a useful way.