Drupal Edu Initiative - Everything you need to know about using Drupal in higher education

Announcing the Drupal Edu Initiative

jazzslider — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:27:10 +0000

Welcome to the Drupal Edu Initiative, a new Drupal site designed to help you share your experiences, thoughts, and advice about using Drupal in higher education.

The Initiative was born out of discussions at DrupalCamp Austin regarding the uniqueness of the higher ed web content management situation. Colleges and universities often face unusual challenges in keeping their websites up-to-date, well-organized and easy to use; we here at the Drupal Edu Initiative believe that Drupal is a key component in solving those problems, and that's why we've launched this site.

At the moment, the site simply provides a link-sharing and blogging mechanism; anyone can register, log in and share a Drupal education-related link, or even post articles right here on the site. All of this user-contributed content is then voted on by our users, so that the most helpful content floats to the top of the home page where it's easy to find.

Please feel free to let us know if you have any suggestions for features or improvements you'd like to see; meanwhile, we look forward to seeing where this initiative takes us in years to come.

Takeaways from "Making Drupal Admin Simple"

jazzslider — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 14:09:46 +0000

While I don't think we're alone in this, Drupal developers in higher education often face a very high need to create sites that are easy for non-technical users to administer. More often than not, college and university departmental websites are maintained by employees with other responsibilities and little web experience; how do we ensure that they can use (and love using) their content management platform?

Yesterday I went to a very helpful session at DrupalCon San Francisco geared towards this question: Making Drupal Admin Simple. Since so many of us need to do just that, I thought I'd share some of the helpful pointers they provided (and recommend that, once it's online, you watch the session recording).

Use an administration menu. It doesn't really matter what you use, so long as your users have an easy, persistent, well-organized list of administrative tasks they can perform.

Edu at DrupalCon

jazzslider — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 14:46:21 +0000

DrupalCon San Francisco is upon us. Here's a brief list of several sessions/BoFs/etc. that might be of interest to those of us in the education world:

Universities, Colleges and Schools with Websites Using Drupal

jazzslider — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:44:23 +0000

Link:

Universities, Colleges and Schools with Websites Using Drupal

Not sure how comprehensive this is, but it looks to be a very helpful list of educational institutions currently using Drupal. Also, it's a wiki page, so if your institution isn't listed, you can add it!

Tour Of Yale's Drupal Infrastructure

filler — Wed, 12 May 2010 12:19:48 +0000

Yale ITS undertook a project in late 2009 to build up an enterprise infrastructure powering Drupal, the university's recently-selected institutional content management system. Nick Silkey recently presented at the first LOPSA Professional IT Community Conference, hosted by the local New Jersey LOPSA chapter, on how this was accomplished. From the program booklet:

"Content management systems are nothing new. What is new is the idea of a pressable, one-click infrastructure which can provision on-demand. This talk centers around the decision points and lessons learned from the infrastructure side of the house when a 30,000-person university standardizes upon an open-source content management system to host a rainbow of web content for various flavors of students, faculty, and staff. We shall discuss tools actively leveraged in the trenches which support automated builds and deployment, version-control systems, continuous integration workflow tools, along with high-availabilty infrastructure components.

Faculty selling virtual texts to their own students: An ethical problem and a technical solution

mathieso — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:15:42 +0000

Link:

Faculty selling virtual texts to their own students: An ethical problem and a technical solution

A controversial paper that examines the ethics of requiring students to buy books written by their instructors. Takes a hard line. Shows how to avoid the problem in Drupal.

Making conversation with Drupal

mathieso — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:11:32 +0000

Link:

Making conversation with Drupal

Lessons can include conversations. Characters in conversations model good learning practices for readers.

How we built our Drupal distribution

jazzslider — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:17:49 +0000

Over the last couple of years the UNT community has been steadily migrating to Drupal; we recently selected Drupal as the official campus CMS, and are currently running several hundred Drupal sites in production.

The university Central Web Support office (where I work) is tasked with managing the Drupal instances we give to folks around campus, along with applying security updates, end-user documentation, and other general support services. We face a number of unique challenges in this capacity:

How do we maintain a consistent look and feel throughout the enterprise?
How do we ensure a reasonably simple user experience, especially when many of our users are non-technical folks saddled with web responsibilities on top of their usual jobs?

CMS Initiative, Appalachian State University

jazzslider — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:52:58 +0000

Link:

CMS Initiative, Appalachian State University

Appalachian State University has put together a very informative set of resources for its clients; of general interest is the "Benefits" page, which could be of use to anyone trying to convince a potential site admin to use Drupal.

Dries's Education Section

jazzslider — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:46:07 +0000

Link:

Dries's Education Section

Dries Buytaert maintains a list of education sites using Drupal; definitely worth looking through, especially if you're in the process of selecting an official CMS for your school and need some good in-the-wild examples.