Integrating industrial partners into e-teaching efforts

Since 2008 we have been using the existing university-wide learning management system (LMS) “Virtual Campus” (VC) to incorporate industrial partners into e-teaching courses at the University of Bamberg. We have developed different co-operation types and evaluated their appropriateness in pilot co-operations between lecturers of the University of Bamberg and regional industrial partners – respecting legal requirements, too. The vast amount of LMS courses available for students lead to a special co-operation web portal for companies, which we have ported to common social networks using the OpenSocial API. The social network application elevates the convenience for the company users, supports the matching of companies’ interests and co-operation topics and uses the social graph of the project partners to reach potential attendees.

In this paper we give a general overview of popular social networks. We describe similarities and differences in target groups, APIs, and also application and data protection policies. We explicate the use cases of our application and explain the process of developing applications based on the Open- Social API. We also describe the experiences we have made with the application admission procedures of different social networks and give an outlook on how we want to utilize Facebook’s Social Graph API and embed Facebook widgets and features (e.g. recommendation and authorization) into the existing web version of our co-operation portal.