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Drupal for Educators and Academics: From Modules to Institutional Cultures

Slide 1: Drupal for Educators and Academics: From Modules to Institutional Cultures

Drupal for Educators and Academics: From Modules to Institutional Cultures

Dominik Lukeš

University of East Anglia

School of Education and Lifelong Learning

Centre for Action Research in Education

http://research.edu.uea.ac.uk

http://www.dominiklukes.net

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Slide 2: My Drupal Acad/EDU websites

My Drupal Acad/EDU websites

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Slide 3: Other Acad/Edu Webs with Drupal

Other Acad/Edu Webs with Drupal

  • Huitalk http://www.huitalk.com
  • University of Calgary (http://www.ucalgary.ca)
  • http://www.camot.net (research)
  • http://research.yale.edu/swahili/learn
  • http://nasacolab.org
  • http://anthropology.net (Now Wordpress?)

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Slide 4: Drupal’s big GAP!

Drupal’s big GAP!

  • Drupal is great for massive projects (MTV, Sony, Mothersclick, Greenpeace…)
  • Drupal is great for small(ish) personal or single project sites (http://info.ulrich-schrader.de)
  • Drupal falls short for small organizations such as schools, departments or small associations with no budget for continuous website support
  • This is not a technical problem but rather an institutional problem; institutions need to change perspective and processes but Drupal community should be aware of the gap

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Slide 5: The ‘truth’ about education

The ‘truth’ about education

  • Sectors: Public/Private, Primary/Secondary/Higher/Further, Formal/Non-formal, Small/Large, Face-to-face/Distance
  • Stakeholders: Students, Teachers, School administrators, Parents, Employers, Alumni
  • Materials: Textbooks, Audio/Visual, Interactive, Realia, Tests
  • Processes: Learning, Teaching, Studying, (Memorization, Projects, Case studies, etc.), Testing, Examination, Portfolio building, Mentoring, Socialization, Transitions, Logistics (scheduling, fees, HR, Privacy, …)

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Slide 6: Problems to solve

Problems to solve

  • Present school
  • Provide a “Virtual Learning Environment”
    • Set assignments
    • Create materials and tests
    • Communicate with others
  • Administer courses, students, classrooms, timtabling
  • Maintain privacy of students
  • Involve others (e.g. parents)

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Slide 7: Drupal’s response

Drupal’s response

  • Direct
    • DrupalEd Distro (http://drupaled.org)
    • PhpEdu (http://www.phpedu.org.uk)
    • Quiz, Gradebook module
    • Moodle integration (???)
    • Old modules: Vocab, Question-and-Answer Sets, FlashCard
  • Indirect
    • Buddy list, User points, Facebook integration?
    • Organic groups, Bio/Nodeprofile
    • Views/CCK (databases), Access control (privacy), Taxonomy, Book module

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Slide 8: Drupal’s competition

Drupal’s competition

  • VLEs:
    • Blackboard/WebCT
    • Moodle, ATutor, LearnNI
    • Digication
    • “TuiT.glottalstart.com” (available for porting)
  • Testing systems (questionmark, …)
  • Others CMSs
  • Social networking

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Slide 9: Where Drupal falls short

Where Drupal falls short

  • No (comprehensive/mature) modules for…
    • Creation of interactive materials (Quiz)
    • Assignment workflow (PHPEdu)
    • Classroom management (OG, distros)
    • Testing (standards compliance) (Quiz)
    • Privacy assurances (Access control)
  • Mature Drupal shops dedicated to education (growing: e.g. Funnymonkey, Palantir)
  • Small/Big dilemma

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Slide 10: The truth about academia

The truth about academia

  • Research (surveys, interviews, experiments, thinking, literature review, )
    • Research communication (Establishing networks of trust (see philosophy of science))
    • Publication (books, journals, ejournals, websites)
    • Peer review (journals, conferences)
    • Conferences
    • Projects
  • Institutional logistics (departments, teaching, supervision, communication)

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Slide 11: Academia’s Paradox

Academia’s Paradox

  • HTML (the web) was invented by academics for sharing and collaboration and it was OK but not all that good at it (a bit better than Gopher)
  • Now that the internet is the web and it’s getting better all the time at sharing (social networking is academia’s bread and butter); academics are still living in the world of static HTML and email

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Slide 12: Problems to solve

Problems to solve

  • Organize conferences
  • Share bibliographies
  • Anonymously peer review submissions
  • Share writing
  • Annotate
  • Build communities
  • Focus fragmentation
  • User resistance
  • Multi-institutional collaboration

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Slide 13: Key modules for Academics

Key modules for Academics

http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-research-and-academia

  • Biblio, OAI-PMH, Z39.50 Search
  • eJournal (CCK/Views)
  • Footnotes, Table of Contents
  • Conference / Conference distro
  • Event/Calendar/Signup/Schedule
  • Similar entries
  • Other modules: CCK/Views, Organic Groups, Wiki, Book, Fileshare/Filebrowser, MySite

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Slide 14: What more could Drupal do

What more could Drupal do

  • Modules:
    • collaborative writing projects, automatic pagination, better WYSIWIG integration
    • OG2List, email integration (not all web)
    • blogging projects
    • annotation/mark up(cf. GPL3 project)
    • Blackboard integration
    • Publish/Subscribe module
  • Other: dedicated companies targeting universities and research centers

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Slide 15: Drupal’s competition/inspiration

Drupal’s competition/inspiration

  • Connotea (Social bookmarking for academics)
  • CiteULike.org (social bibliographies)
  • Sakai (http://sakaiproject.org - Java based Virtual Research Environment – VRE)
  • Brochuware CMSs
  • Moodle, Blackboard, etc.

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Slide 16: My conclusions…

My conclusions…

  • Drupal’s has a lot of potential in the academic / educational space
  • An individual or a small dedicated group can implement a ‘good enough’ website fast
  • The edu/academic world lacks infrastructure for maintaining CMSs in general (funding, mindset) and needs ‘education’ and support from dedicated companies

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Slide 17: Discussion

Discussion

  • Sites
  • Projects
  • Modules
  • Other problems to solve
  • Suggestions, ideas, disagreements
  • …

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