Use Drupal? In a University? Want to join forces?

While I'm no longer actively involved in drupal development at a university level, I think this is a fantastic idea.

Dave

I would definitely support sharing experiences and combining resources. We've had similar experiences here at University of Delaware. A lot of interest (especially since that's what our central IT will be supporting!), not sure exactly how to get started moving their existing sites, and IT administration doing their best to support everything. Drupal is tough. We're moving along in our implementation but would definitely be happy sharing what we do and learning what others do.

I would prefer a "Drupal for Large Universities" over Higher Education since most of the issues that we're talking about (scalability, enterprise integration, authentication, staffing/personnel issues, etc...) are specific to the size of the organization and associated IT infrastructure rather than the grade level. 's what distinguishes us from Drupal in Education. Some smaller Higher Ed groups (some small community colleges, trade schools, individual departments or faculty members in larger universities) do not have to deal with many of these issues. Their focus seems to be on eLearning first and implementation later on. Our issues are the reverse.

I think there's a lot we can do. I'm not so sure about the Consortium idea. I posted more comments and some ideas on your blog: http://btopro.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/drupal-for-universities-consortium-interested-come-to-the-table/

I think this idea of setting up such a group is interesting and I'll be an active member.

And, fwiw, I'd be completely open to restructuring the education group to make this work. The current structure is (IMO) less than ideal.

A clean re-org, with an eye toward making it easier to find relevant content, would be a good thing.

FunnyMonkey
Click. Connect. Learn.
Using Drupal in Education

This is in reference to several threads I've seen on this topic so...

I'm not suggesting abandoning this group by any means. As I envision it, this would more so kinda be a group within this group. Discussions and things would still happen here and the two would be highly linked together but a Consortium that's a type of steering committee if you will for people specific to University settings to come up with a list of what has and has not worked to get a general best practice guide going.

Part of the reason for having a semi-external entity is that a Consortium would be made up of all different university players. Taking the argument for some to go Drupal over whatever and pointing them to this site is very different then pointing them over to a cross-university developed and build resource. While the members of this site know the weight that this group holds, in terms of name branding and clout, this group doesn't hold the same weight to non-Drupal people that it does to others. There is still a large segment of the population that are going to ask "who else uses this?" and pointing to a list on g.d.o. instead of pointing to an external entity will hold less credibility to them.

This isn't intended to shard this community, just build out another resource to help funnel people into the community as a whole (similar to the mini book that I have for Drupalineducation). It lays out the case for going Drupal in an environment that is very unsure of where to go. It also references back to the community and doesn't have any communication of it's own.

I also see this group being very beneficial to Drupal in Education because it could be behind a sort of Drupal-Education-Con type of event held yearly. There was a whole track at DrupalCampWI for education and I think, again clout coming into play, a muti-university driven initiative could get people from across the country together to talk Drupal implementations specific to education. This could be done for education as a whole and not just specific to large universities but the large universities are still the ones that are going to hold the weight so that when making a pitch to come.

Hope this clears some things up and sparks yet more discussion. Not trying to fracture the community, just trying to strength it via this group. Similar to the way Sony backing Blue Ray pushed it to the forefront as a standard :)

"Plaguing the world with Drupal; One Plone, Moodle, Wordpress, Joomla user at a time since 2005." ~ btopro

http://elearning.psu.edu/
http://elearning.psu.edu/projects/
http://elearning.psu.edu/drupalineducation/

good thoughts btopro.

I would definitely take part. It has been very helpful for me to discuss Drupal with other highered folks. I think we deal with some issues that some small business Drupal developers may not. ex: scalability, e-learning methodology, etc.