Why is there resistance at your school / college towards using Drupal?
public
group: Drupal in Education
btopro@drupal.org - Mon, 2008-04-21 03:39
Established CMS like blackboard, webCT, etc. do most of what we need.
22% (2 votes)
There is a lack of understanding of what Drupal could do for us.
11% (1 vote)
There is a lack of technical expertise in house in order to implement Drupal.
22% (2 votes)
There is fear of moving into the open source and "unsupported" platform of Drupal.
22% (2 votes)
*gasp* Moodle is in use AND free AND educationally focused out of the box.
11% (1 vote)
Never thought of using it for education before.
0% (0 votes)
I'm not sure what you're talking about, there's no resistance, they love Drupal!
11% (1 vote)
Total votes: 9
The real problem
On balance I voted for the moodle question but many institutions feel quite happy with Blackboard (even though it is woefully behind the times and a huge pain to use).
The the real answer, I think, is a combination of points 2, 3 and 4 (understanding, skill sets, support). I made this point in my Drupalcon presentation in Barcelona: http://www.slideshare.net/bohemicus/drupal-for-educators-and-academics.
What is really missing (at least in the UK) is a prominent Drupal shop (or more) that specializes in providing Drupal to educational institutions. Such company would have to offer direct support, staff training and custom development. There are a number of Moodle and Elgg shops and, of course, Blackboard offers a whole slew of services along these lines (albeit on the back of a deficient product).
This whole thing combines with a huge chokehold Microsoft has over educational institutions developed not just by antimonopolistic practices but by provision of broad education and direct training. This has led to a deskilling of the support staff at educational institutions who instinctively turn to MS products when in doubt (to the point of considering Sharepoint as a VLE/CMS equivalent). Setting up and tuning a LAMP server is beyond the skill set of a significant proportion of support staff many of whom had never used the command line.
I've been thinking about putting together a more general conference on Open Source and e-Learning in the UK to start catching up on Microsoft's and Blackboard's propaganda and skill lead. I've just heard of another possible event - more details soon. Please, let me know if you're interested in Drupal for education in the UK.
Dominik
Dominik Lukes
http://www.dominiklukes.net
http://www.bohemica.com
http://tuit.glottalstart.com