Posted by btopro on April 21, 2008 at 3:39am
Established CMS like blackboard, webCT, etc. do most of what we need.
20% (5 votes)
There is a lack of understanding of what Drupal could do for us.
20% (5 votes)
There is a lack of technical expertise in house in order to implement Drupal.
24% (6 votes)
There is fear of moving into the open source and "unsupported" platform of Drupal.
12% (3 votes)
*gasp* Moodle is in use AND free AND educationally focused out of the box.
8% (2 votes)
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!
16% (4 votes)
Total votes: 25
Comments
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
Dominik Lukes
http://dominiklukes.net
@techczech
Moodle yes, Drupal next...
Just spotted this group.
I have been thinking about using Drupal for our school. We have Moodle courtesy of the marvellous BucksGfL and Moodle is of course great but it doesn't really do blogs right. Of course we would have to set up Drupal ourselves, which in practice means that I would put it on hosting account somewhere. The LA seem to have something against.
I finally managed to
I finally managed to convince my school to go with Drupal and I have to say, all of the problems I've encountered trying to get the website to "go live" since I built it have been institutional in nature, and have had nothing to do with Drupal at all.
Both of these hit the nail on the head as to why we struggled to make a decision for inclusion of Drupal. To make the point even more difficult, practically no one in Thailand has heard of Drupal or uses it, so hence whenever one of the school admins consulted an "expert" they were given conflicting advice ("Oh you have to build the site in Mambo 4.6, that's what all of the professionals use" and other such nonsense).
how about...
... most of all of the above as a selection?
Forgot to put in an all of
Forgot to put in an all of the above option :). Hopefully after Drupalcon some more walls will tumble down. Good things happen when Drupal-minded people get together for show and tell ;)
"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/
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/
in house cms
Our university has an in house custom built CMS tool that they charge departments to use, and perhaps not coincidentally heavily insist we all use, too.
Sounds very farmiliar...
Sounds very farmiliar... that's the hardest one to break free of.
"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/
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/
Oregon State University
Our Central Web Services group has migrated almost completely to Drupal for department web sites. They have some custom workflow built in and don't allow much in the way of custom themes and modules, but it's definitely Drupal.
I believe Portland State University is also migrating to Drupal for their central web presence.
-Greg
Smith College
Security especially in 3rd party modules is a concern over here. (I don't see that in the poll).
I think we're lucky on that
I think we're lucky on that there isn't a lot of opposition for opposition's sake. But there are valid issues around training, appropriateness of multi-site installs (how many and how do you 'categorise' sites?), and issues around 3rd party modules (dealing separately with 'final' versions / RC or beta module in a multi-site environment).
Didn't list security cause it isn't an issue :)
I would add "perceived lack of security" (can't cause of the discussion topic settings) but I personally lump that under "There is fear of moving into the open source and "unsupported" platform of Drupal."
"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/
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/