Arguments for and against using Drupal

I'd love to spend a half-day discussing this. It's a hot topic in strategic planning for Newton Public Schools right now. Here's a quick response with a couple of points.

1. A big concern with Drupal (and Moodle, to a lesser degree), is a perceived lack of professional service providers who provide Drupal services. Other products, like Edline and MagicWand come with a well-defined professional services component, even if they are relatively small. With Drupal, the IT staff feels like this is missing.

At least Moodle offers the Moodle Service Network at moodle.com, which recommends specific partners for hosting, installation, customisation, etc. If we, the Drupal Education group, could cultivate a similar reference list of professional providers with whom we have some experience, I think it would go a long way towards addressing this concern.

2. In various conversations, I've gained the impression that Moodle is perceived as a safer, more accepted way for teachers to dip their toe into the Web 2.0 waters. It's specifically designed for education and learning management, whereas Drupal is much more generalized. Moodle also provides some good documentation on how to create and share courses, which Drupal does not.

I think Drupal would benefit from more productization specifically focused on the education market.

These are my two main points for now.

Erik B-W

What are the common arguments in favor of using Drupal?
I think the biggest factors for using Drupal are Cost, Customization, and ease of use on the front end (explanation later). Cost is the big one, being that a single website can cost upwards of 20k here in the united states. Customization being that you can truly customize Drupal to fit almost any front end need. And ease of use could be argued. However I have found that once a Drupal site is set up properly, most users have no problem using a flavor of WYSIWYG editor and creating news and blogs for the site.

What arguments have people encountered against using Drupal?
The BUS factor (thanks to Kirok for the analogy). How many people need to get hit by a bus before no one knows how to administer the back end of your Drupal installation? Here, I cross train one person on how to administer our LAMP stack that handles Drupal and Moodle. Many rural districts do not have this luxury. This brings up the question of documentation and commercial support, which ebrittwebb mentions. I document EVERYTHING that I do to our web servers, so that the next person can follow along. Much of this has to do with your internal policies on documenting your servers, rather then the viability of Drupal as a platform for education.

I really believe that Drupal and Moodle serve two different functions. I think Drupal is king of the front end web site platform. A "launch pad" if you will, for information and additional services. In our scenario, all of our informational and organizational web sites are in drupal, but we do not try to re-invent drupal for Course content. For that, we use Moodle, which is what moodle was built for.

What resources/arguments have been helpful overcoming concerns about using Drupal?
The, "we can save 10's of thousands of dollars by moving our platform over to Drupal" seemed to be the seller where I am:P

Chad

I've been asked this since day one because there are two large CMS-like systems at Penn State. The first is called Angel and is proprietary. The second is called weblion and is zope-plone with some customization. The reason that I went against both of these is simple - control. Both Angel and Weblion didn't off the full control that running our own Drupal install do. As Erik said, I could probably spend half the day talking about this (and me and my boss often do as we get into discussions with other administrators / units around campus). As for a listing of justification, I've created a Diigo group called Drupal in Education and anytime I find a usage of Drupal in the edu sector or something good as it pertains to justification I try to tag it in there. Here's some arguments that I like to throw into the mix with all the anecdotal ones against Drupal / Open projects:

1. Drupal has BETTER support then proprietary solutions - The average life time of an issue for drupal core was about 5-6 days. The averages can be confusing since drupal is getting pretty old now so pay closer attention to the "last month" stats. If there's a security problem out there and someone finds it it will only benefit....EVERYONE if it's fixed. Everyone's incentive to patch issues is a little scary to rely on but it's only because there's no one person to blame if something goes wrong.
2. This group and your creativity are what make Drupal more educationally focused - I know we've got 3 or 4 projects coming down the pipe that will start to push Drupal in a more education specific direction and I'm sure other people do too (just look at some of the projects floating around this group!). A couple good installation profiles could be clutch in getting people on board. That way when you look at d.o. and say "oh, there's a Web-Course installation profile" it's much less daunting then to say "I've got to install how many modules to get a web-course!?". Instructional Designer is in the works (derivative work of course designer, very syllabus / instructional flow oriented) and all projects we're working on here are going to be generic and openly designed so everyone can use them.
3. It's an idea a few of us around psu have kicked around but would people be interested in having web / physical meet ups to create some kind of drupal / education consortium? It might do a lot for the community even if it just starts as an IRC only thing to help facilitate discussion as well as create a reputation / entitiy to point to that Drupal in Education is a large movement.

Some less scientific answers: It's what I know how to use, it's a VERY well supported and open project, more people are adding features and modules everyday, It's the perfect compliment to open educational resources (OER), we can integrate it more closely with our own infrastrature, we can theme everything to look visually appealing. My favorites being that Moodle sites always look like Moodle and that you don't want to have to be able to program Python in order to use Zope-Plone. Proprietary solutions are getting easier and easier to talk people out of, just point to Penn State or Amherst or any other universities / schools listed on this group for justification that Drupal is a viable solution.

"Moodle? What's moodle?"

http://elearning.psu.edu/
http://elearning.psu.edu/projects
http://drupal.org/project/outline_designer
http://drupal.org/project/html_export
http://drupal.org/project/search_and_replace

I think an IRC channel is a great idea. I'm in IRC all day every day, and would be happy to help out with this if anyone else thinks it is a good idea.

Chad

I just gave a talk at Vancouver Drupal Camp 2008 discussing how we sold Drupal to our organization (University of Lethbridge).

My slides were pretty sparse, but you'll see some common scenarios and our responses (support, training, community, legitimacy).

http://people.uleth.ca/~michael.warf/2008/05/12/back-from-drupal-camp-va...

I have a piece on the Kairos Praxis Wiki about Drupal deployment in the Professional Writing Program at Purdue University. For us the main factor was having a small but motivated core team of people who were able to roll out Drupal departmentally. This provided a critical mass of instructor/users that became its own support network, because new users were all having similar acclimation experiences.

Curiously, the technical side has never been too much of an issue, because new instructor/users have a semester-long mentoring experience, and we have a dedicated Drupal support staff member (me). Gaining institutional approval is a different challenge. Our institution is invested in WebCT, and it seems that other departments and campus IT personnel aren't quite sure what to make of our in-house use of Drupal. In their defense, I can understand from an administrative and technical standpoint the benefits of using a standard CMS across departments, but I'm sure that everyone in this group will agree that WebCT is not a ubiquitous solution. We are a writing field, and WebCT doesn't offer what we need to support student learning effectively. Drupal's flexibility is a large advantage in this area; our task is making the broader university understand that. We were fortunate that the Professional Writing Program head was spearheading our push to use Drupal, because from my limited experience, institutional matters are a bigger headache than getting buy-in from instructors and students.

One area where Drupal kicks the tail of many others is teaching social media. That is, teaching people how to use web based tools like blogs, wikis, forums, video sharing, etc

I am right now working on this with some educators, and the results will also end up producing some new scoring/teacher tracking interfaces, at least in future iterations, of not the first (probably based on advanced profile, maybe node review). Also, there will be peer review among students as an option. I borrowed some concepts from DrupalEd for some of this (including using the very clean zen_classic theme as a basis).

I'll definitely share more info as we get closer to a real release.

Sam Rose
Social Synergy
Open Source Ecology
P2P Foundation

I am a member of an association here in ireland (who shall not be named, heh) which is in desperate need of a website redesign. Currently there are plain html pages, and a moodle environment. Many of the members are in higher education, so it seemed to make sense to keep the group in 'moodle'- however, they have realized moodle is not capable of being a CMS. So they are looking around for a solution.

The people who have been managing the site from the start looked around, and decided on EZPublish, which they had used before on a University website. I think EZ Publish could probably manage the job alright, but I think Drupal could do it better. I brought up Drupal in a sub-team meeting of 4 people (inc myself) who describe themselves in some manner as "learning technologists"- and the overall response to Drupal was markedly negative. They thought it was difficult to set-up, and customize and manage on the back end. They didn't think it could support community features; they thought it would require installation of two systems- Drupal for the 'front-end about-pages' and another for the Member's area... etc etc...

It turns out, each had installed Drupal - and found it difficult to use. One person compared it to the installation and set up of Wordpress- and said Wordpress was much better. So they worried about the ease of use for the members.

I acknowledged that there is a steep learning curve for the site manager who is setting up Drupal who is familiar with another CMS. (Isn't any new system a challenge? Isn't that the /joy/ of working with new technologies? I didn't ask that!) However, for the end-user, when everything is set up and customized to their needs, it is intuitive and easy... I had my left hand making a sharp curve "up" and my right hand moving up an inclined slope as a visual metaphor...

I wish I had thought of the metaphor of a manual-transmission car... With a manual transmission- yes it is more difficult to drive /if/ you're used to an automatic transmission. Yet, you have more control over the car; they're more fuel efficient; less-costly to maintain.

Anyway.... the group offered to reconsider it, and I have a few days to gather up some evidence to convince the team that Drupal would be the way to go...

I can find plenty on how great Drupal is for SEO, how great it is for workflowing, about all the brilliant social/community modules and features....

But I still need something about the Usability of Drupal; about the learning curves... about the experience for the end user, perhaps in comparison to EZPublish or other random CMS, or even Wordpress-as-CMS.

And since I'm so biased- I need help pointing out the Cons of Drupal. (Cons? Yes I need to show pros /and/ cons of Drupal.)

Any ideas?