Tagged for OEG Connect: Make Academic Alliance

OEGlobal Plaza
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What’s of interest? Make Academic Alliance

Tell me more!

We’re excited to work with universities and schools worldwide to equip students with the no-code and automation skills to thrive in an ever-evolving global marketplace.

And since we want teachers, students, and researchers to make the most of Make for academic purposes, we are offering free professional Make plans through the Make Academic Alliance.

In addition, there will always be a dedicated Academic Alliance Manager to help our academic allies identify the best support tool for their needs.

Make is a multicultural company with employees from 40 different countries working from many locations around the world.

Thanks to this, the Make Academic Alliance can deliver lectures in person or online in several languages spoken by native speakers.

Where is it?: https://www.make.com/en/academic-alliance

This is one among many items I will regularly tag in Pinboard as oegconnect, and automatically post tagged as #OEGConnect to Mastodon. Do you know of something else we should share like this? Just reply below and we will check it out.

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You might be using and aware of services like Zapier and IFTTT that let you create simple web services to take content from one source (like new posts from a blog or newly hashtagged content in a social media site) and then “do” something with it, like post it elsewhere.

That’s what I set up in Zapier to post here in OEG Connect (using the Discourse API) when I tag a site I have bookmarked in pinboard to send here (I used Zapier because it was the one at the time i could find that could work with discourse as a place to publish).

And I have been using IFTTT to publish similar things, as well as my blog posts and flickr photos tagged with my dog’s name (like you need to do this, eh?) to his Mastodon account.

The issue is IFTTT has been eroding it’s free service, first limiting to 4 and now 2 “applets” per account (I set up multiple accounts under different emails), but then they also removed the ability to post to Mastodon via a thing called webhooks.

It was almost a fluke that I discovered an alternative at https://make.com that is actually quite more powerful in terms of the complexity of the logic you can create, but also, it gives you much much more you can change, modify with the output.

The details here are not relevant, but Make lets you access all the information in the trigger (in this case an RSS feed) and format how you want it output, including applying functions (I use ones to strip HTML and remove a bot of extra text I don’t need).

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There again are limits on how many “scenarios” you can create on Make.com and how many requests per month, but I’m able to keep under the limit. But I like this service a lot, and is maybe one I’d consider paying for.

They also have a free “academy” to learn how to use the platform (I ought to take it rather than plundering along)

But as you can also see from the link shared here, Make is interested in use by schools and learners.

I find understanding how to manipulate and process information from web sites as useful a skill as typing in AI prompt boxes, maybe more.

Does anyone make use of these integration services? Might they offer some means for students to learn how to do some code like logic without coding?