I spent some time yesterday playing around with HootCourse, a course communication and backchannel tool. A teacher can set up a course within HootCourse, then invite students to join the course. Students can login to the course using existing Twitter or Facebook accounts.

Everyone in the course can post tweets–course announcements, questions for the teacher, links to share–that show up within the course. These tweets can also be shared on the user’s Twitter or Facebook account. Tweets are limited to 140 characters, although HootCourse has a blog integration tool that allows you to post longer items.  That’s what I’m doing right now with this post, sending it to a test course I set up in HootCourse for my fall cryptography course.

Here are some features of HootCourse:

  • Students can use an existing Facebook account to participate.  No need for a separate account or to join Twitter.
  • Course-related tweets are saved indefinitely, without any need for a service like TwapperKeeper.
  • You can embed your HootCourse as a tab or inline widget on your course blog or web page, or as a Google Gadget.
  • There’s classroom mode that makes it easy to project the latest course-tweets during class.
  • Twitter users contributing from HootCourse.com can choose whether to post to Twitter or just the course.
  • Twitter users can tweet to the course directly from their preferred Twitter application just by using the course hashtag.  Or they can tweet to all their courses by using the #hootcourse hashtag.
  • You can protect the URL for joining your course so that only those you share the URL with can join.
  • If you share your course-tweet on Twitter and someone replies, that reply won’t be part of the HootCourse unless the respondent is already in the course.  This limits the network effect (the ability to grow a conversation beyond its original participants), but provides something of an anti-spam measure, especially if the joining URL is protected.  (If the joining URL isn’t protected, the outsider can join the course and then reply, of course.)
  • For contributions longer than 140 characters, you can link a blog to your HootCourse profile, making it easy to link to your course-related blog posts.

More on this new tool later, particularly its potential as an in-class backchannel tool.