Open Source E-Learning Development 9: Drupal CMS
Very much like platforms like Moodle and Joomla!, Drupal is an open-source Content Management System (CMS) freely available under the GPL. It is used as a back-end system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to Enterprise 2.0 collaboration and knowledge management uses to large corporate and political sites. In October 2009, the administration of U.S. president Barack Obama adopted Drupal for the official Whitehouse.gov website.
Originally written by Dutch student Dries Buytaert as a message board to communicate with friends and colleagues about the various details of their lives. To meet that need, Dries wrote 
a web-based application that allowed people to share notes. Drupal became an open source project in a year later. Despite its roots in an educational environment, Drupal is not a traditional Learning Management System: it’s actually a Content Management System (CMS). It began life as a community-building platform, and its community-centered roots have since determined Drupal’s range of uses ever since.
In a learning context, Drupal supports a wide variety of tools for educators. For example, it can function as a blogging platform, enabling teachers to communicate directly with students, other instructors and the larger web-based learning community.
Drupal-based sites can be used for far more than blogging. Within a single Drupal site, you can
- set up social bookmarking
- podcasts
- video hosting
- formal and informal study groups
- detailed user profiles
- …and other features commonly associated with Learning 2.0.
Designing a site in Drupal allows you to develop the features you need, and to expand as required in the future. One interesting Drupal-based learning initiative is DrupalEd. According to it’s developers:
The goal of this site is to create a flexible framework that allows for users to set up a social learning environment or a more traditional learning environment depending on the needs of the learners within the site. With this current framework, both approaches are supported.
They continue -
This site can be used as an informal learning site where all users have comparable permissions, or as a more hierarchical learning environment with students, teachers, classes, and working groups.
Some of the functionality within this site includes:
- a personal workspace
- a group workspace
- the ability for site members to create informal working groups
- the ability to create formal class spaces
- a podcasting platform
- a WYSIWYG text editor
- wiki functionality
- personal and class blogs
- RSS feeds for the entire site, individual courses, individual terms, and individual users
- personal image galleries
- personal file repositories
- the ability to create private, invitation-only groups
- social bookmarking, with searching within bookmark descriptions
- spam protection
- assignment calendars by course
- event calendars for site-wide events
- configurable user profiles with searchable text descriptions
- the ability to create lists of “friends” among site members
- the ability to find the missing sock in the dryer [apparently!]
Click here to view DrupalEd’s Using Drupal as a Portfolio Platform demo.
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References:
Elliott, P. (2009) White House opens Web site programming to public. Associated Press. [Internet] Available from: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iuRIVBTLUvW7823FC-fcfhvkSxHgD9BHLF180 Retrieved 25 October 2009.
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November 02 2009 03:45 pm | e-learning
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