Posted by rdalton on April 18, 2008 at 4:04pm
I am new to Drupal - Just created a new drupal website. My question to this group is this: I would like to add functionality similar to Blackboard's Prosites to my online package. Since I am a novice, I don't know if Drupal will be able to do this? Any ideas or comments?
Thanks
Comments
What is blackboard's prosites
For those of us who don't know much about blackboard -- could you describe what blackboard's prosite is -- specifically what functionality you'd like replicated in Drupal?
Kyle Mathews
Kyle Mathews
I've only been on the
I've only been on the student side of blackboard (not sure if it is a prosite or not), but the group discussion boards are a pain to find, while the forums you could have linked on the front page, and usually by default the forums atached to groups will be displayed there as well with the proper modules.
Closed organic groups for the instructors to create within the class group is a must, and you could set up an email function to send emails whenever content of a certain type is submitted - I've seen it done with Drupal, and that would allow display of the emails on the site and they will be sent to the people's inboxes. With OG Forum, you could add the functionality of the group discussion boards.
You could have a closed group for each class, and allow subgroups to be created.
It could be done, albeit it would take time to reprodcue every function, but it can be done.
Depends on what you want
My understanding is that Blackboard Prosites is plain old Blackboard offered as a hosted service.
If it is hosted service that you want, www.bryght.com seems to offer some really nice hosted Drupal products, but I've never used them.
If it is learning / course management software you are looking for -- I would start with Moodle first rather than try to build everything in Drupal. Moodle is not as flexible as Drupal, but everything you need to run a class, or a whole school district full of classes, is ready right out of the box with Moodle. Drupal would require alot of building to get to that point, but it could do it with some work.
And there are several hosted Moodle providers out there so you don't need to run your own server if you don't want to, just like Blackboard Prosites.
If you are set on trying out Drupal, DrupalEd (www.drupaled.org) would probably be a good place to start to get you part way to something like a course management system in Drupal. Although even DrupalEd, as I understand it, is not so much a full course management system as an attempt to interject social networking into the classroom.
At our school, Hopkins Schools in Minnesota, we have decided to run Drupal and Moodle side-by-side, sharing user accounts and integrating them whenever possible. We use Moodle for web content that is course-related, and Drupal for all other web stuff in the district, and as the portal to present our various web tools to the end user.
That's what we came up with, but it would be great to hear what you come up with for your needs.