we were very proud to receive an official entry from the Open University in the UK. this is an impressive, well-thought app that provides access to lots of high quality content.

the Open University is the UK’s leading and largest university. they have ~ 200,000 students each year and over 2 million alumni. since its foundation in the late 1960 the OU has pioneered the idea of open education and perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of this openness is evidenced in the OU setting no entrance criteria for students (as someone who barely finished high-school i really appreciate it!).

the openness to methods and ideas has lead to the OU being known as pioneer of many new technologies for educational purpose. OU is at the forefront of using latest tools and technologies for learning. today of course the internet plays a huge role in teaching but also in enabling OU students and alumni to come together as a community.

the OU wrote a Boxee Drupal module which scans all of the OU content on YouTube and all of the content on OU podcast directory and controls the RSS feeds that the Boxee app consumes. they also created a custom featured section for boxee users.

the OU has lots of good ideas for where to take their boxee app going forward. i will be looking forward to it. the content is great! we need to see how we can help expose it more prominently in boxee in the future.

Liam Green-Hughes is one of the developers who built the app. we’ve been chatting over Twitter. you can reach out to him with ideas and feedback.

the OU in their own words about boxee:

The Open University application has been produced by the largest UK university which is known for its innovative use of new technology and high quality broadcast output.

A small team worked to produce an application and interface which indexed Open University content in YouTube http://www.youtube.com/ou and iTunes U www.open.ac.uk/itunes and re-presented and categorised it within the Boxee environment.  A Boxee Drupal module was built to effectively and easily manage this process and provide RSS feeds for the Boxee app to consume.  This module sits within the OU’s student and alumni community site Platform (www.open.ac.uk/platform) where we hope to produce complementary content and a cross-platform experience.

The Boxee Drupal module also plays a vital role in allowing us to editorialise the material that appears in the ‘Featured’ primary navigation of the Boxee app (in order for example to match international or national campaign weeks or the global news agenda).  We can edit both the content’s title and teaser text for added impact / relevance.

Thousands of hours of coherent educational and passion-based video and audio content is made available across a huge range of subjects.