ELMS

I've been working on a port of the Outline Designer module to Drupal 6 and it's almost ready for release. I've got a demo up of the current progress / direction that the project is taking but it's drastically changed since the Drupal 5 version; both architecturally and in terms of usability. It now piggy-backs functionality of the Ajax, Book, and Thickbox modules. You can check out the demo / screencast below. Feedback is muuuuuch appriciated as this module is still geared towards making Drupal more usable for the education crowd.

I've been working on a project to make the structuring of content easier / more intuitive. The module was called the Outline Designer and now there's a Drupal 6 version. Please check out the demo below and let me know what you think. It implements a bunch of usability things I've been seeing thrown around on here as well as introduces some new concepts (like a context menu). It integrates / overrides the admin/content/book interface to add ajax elements such as deletion, add a child, content editing, and renaming.

Demo - https://elearning.vmhost.psu.edu/demos/outline_designer/

The outline designer has been posted to drupal.org ( http://drupal.org/project/outline_designer ).

This is the first module in an installation profile which will be ELMS - e-Learning Management System. More information about the ELMS project see the ELMS attack plan posted on the e-Learning Institute's projects site.

So I showed off a veerrrryyy brief presentation of ELMS and the Assignment Studio yesterday but we're working on A LOT of other projects / related projects. So, tonight around 7pm some of us are going to meet up to discuss ELMS and our initiatives at PSU in greater detail. The hope of this discussion is to try and get edu focused developers excited about this direction and start coming up with an attack plan for future development. This product will be available on drupal.org as soon as it's legal (http://drupal.org/project/elms just a name space at the moment and small description).

So, after watching the State of the Drupal presentation and seeing the over-arching directions for the "killer release" version 7, I decided that I should throw some ideas out there. I work for Penn State and more specifically, work on making Drupal more usable for non-drupal users (specifically as it relates to education and online course design). This is where ELMS comes in. ELMS stands for E-Learning Management System and has been developed "for instructional designers, by instructional designers".

Now, I don't mean for this to sound like a plug for a product (cause it's not), I've been developing Drupal modules to help support the development of our e-learning courses at Penn State for the last year now. As things have progressed, our department has begun to pursue making these modules open source. I've been sitting on this stuff for a year now patiently waiting for the right time to start announcing the projects we've been working on and I think many (if not all of them) would be of interest to DrupalEd users.