I came across this thread recently, titled "Moodle as 'the killer app'" -- the author of the original post is Wes Fryer, a very respected edtech blogger.
Also, at the risk of stating the obvious, I don't see Drupal and Moodle as competing within education -- there are things Drupal does well, there are things Moodle does well, and when faced with a choice you use the best tool for the job.
I chime in at comment 8 -- to paraphrase my comment, I observe that Drupal is poorly understood within the K12 edtech community. As the thread progresses, it covers ground that is interesting (to me, anyways) for those working within schools helping to deliver an online environment that supports teaching and learning.
My main takeaway: design plays a major role, and it's something we need to pay more attention to. Many people -- even technical people -- feel lost when looking at a default Drupal install.
I'm curious as to any other opinions after reading the thread. This also relates to this thread about arguments for and against using Drupal in education.
Comments
I agree. Design seems to be the critical issue
Not design in the usual sense of cool images and fancy CSS, but functional design. It gives me new respect for the old adage, "Form follows function." And it's not pretty images and cool CSS that are critical, but the simplicity, usefulness, and clarity of the interface. Google's home page and Craig's List come to mind as prime examples.
I'm struggling to build Drupal sites that serve teachers. The challenge has been how to balance useful/critical features with an absolutely intuitive interface that requires zero training. Teachers as a group, seem to have the following user attributes:
Varied technical skill set, with the majority at the low end,
Stressed, overworked, and mandated to death, with no patience for "yet another thing to learn,"
Require extremely dependable tracking and communications systems. Paper-based systems remain the killer app due to their ability to survive power failures, dead batteries, sudden falls, and even occasional showers. They also have excellent portability and "instant-on" functionality.
Some of my ancient, hand-coded, relatively simple sites were more popular with teachers than what I'm doing now in Joomla and Drupal. I think this is because each page view offered one--and only one--clear function. Those old sites may not have been elegant, but they sure got the job done. The fact that most Drupal admin views begin with paragraph or two of basic directions indicates how far we have to go.
I've found it difficult to slim Drupal down to absolute simplicity. I think it's a conceptual hurdle on my part, not a technical problem. I mean, it's SO HARD to turn off all those cool features when I just know the teachers would love it if they only gave them a try! But we're talking about a population where the ubiquitous phrase, "Request new password" often seems so meaningless as to be ignored even when it's needed.
I've searched without success for other Drupal sites offering teachers what I hope to create. I get the feeling many must have pulled this off by now, and am wondering if it it took a lot of custom PHP and theme tweaking. SchoolWorld (a Cold Fusion site?) seems to me to have found the right mix. There's nothing exciting about the feature set, but teachers flock to their site because it does exactly what they need, and not more.
http://www.schoolworld.com
My Drupal efforts in this direction have been based on OG/CCK/Views. Here's what I've come up with so far. Any comments/suggestions on how to do this better in Drupal would be very much appreciated.
http://class.educationgrove.com
We need to improve DrupalED
Indeed design is a key to good web applications. Any web applications. Teachers aren't usually great at using technology in their work because it takes to much time or effort for them, so this is especially true for eLearning and education applications. We haave to make it easy.
We're talking real design here, not just decorative mojo that doesn't work, buy stuff that really helps get things done. That includes aesthectics, of course, but also technical issues as well.I'm talking about design in a global sense.
I have to admit that Drupal, for now, is absolutely not ready for education applications because of its poor usability. Not out of the box, anyway : it needs a lot of tweaking and testing to get it just right.
But once these changes have been done and tested properly (meaning real user tests with real teachers, no changes to the core code, unit testing,etc.), you can turn them into a distribution, so it benefits everyone. DrupalEd seems to be exactly that, but I don't know how far they've gone with it ; I need to test it.
Anyway, I think a specific education distribution is the way to go, and one seems to exist ; we should probably focus on improving its usability.
DrupalEd's goals are different
I tested DrupalEd a while back and found that it has very different goals from what my schools require.
This was confirmed by Bill F, the maintainer, in another post. He is focusing it on online collaborative learning portfolios. This is a great, student-centric model which I value, and I'm curious to see where/how it's implemented, but I think it's NOT what most admittedly teacher-centric schools need right now.
With "No Child's Left Unscathed" continuing to do its damage across the US, I don't see many schools in this region moving to more innovative, student-centered learning anytime soon. The government would take them over fast if they tried anything that close to Friere's vision. My local school district just got hit by NCLB, and may soon be taken over by the State. Their crime? Having too many new English language learners within the community, who (horror of horrors) don't test that well in English.
Back to Drupal:
My goals include many requirements that are not a part of the DrupalEd install's plan, such as new and current family outreach, volunteer coordination, fund-raising, event planning, resource (room) scheduling, enrollment and registration processing, curriculum descriptions, accountability reporting, private faculty forums, private faculty forms repositories, automated emergency response systems, alumni support, etc. All very doable in Drupal, it seems.
The toughest of all seems to be meeting the limited--but very specific--needs of the teachers. It's like trying to satisfy a large set of opinionated CEOs, don't know what they want, and wouldn't agree in it if they did, and won't tell you what the want, and want it now. :-)
I would be happy to collaborate on a Drupal install profile along these lines. I've checked with Bill F, and he thinks such an install could live here in DrupalEd. To show the relationship AND avoid confusion between the two profiles, what do you think of the profile name, "DrupalSchool"?
A few thoughts, and interesting timing
Hello, all,
I've been meaning to get a post out on the future direction of DrupalEd (and another post on how the community wants to use DrupalEd.org), but those are different stories --
RE student centered/NCLB: Yes, DrupalEd is definitely a student-centered tool, and in building it I will admit that we cared nothing for meeting NCLB reporting requirements -- while the reporting functionality could probably be added on via development, that's not something we will do on our free time. If a client requests it, possibly, but on our own time -- nah.
As an interesting sidenote, it's been petrifying/interesting to watch the financial meltdown currently happening in the states. One of the original beneficiaries of US Gov't largesse was AIG, who was bailed out to the tune of 85 billion. One of the founders of AIG, Eli Broad, has been attempting to reshape public education through the Broad Foundation. They emphasize standardized testing to measure progress, and the idea that schools should be run more like businesses. At this particular point it time, it's a tough argument to make that schools should be run like AIG -- unless, of course, you want to make the argument that schools should immediately receive large bundles of cash. Some blog posts that go into this in more detail:
http://philanthropy.com/giveandtake/article/713/aig-bailout-and-eli-broad
http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2008/09/eli-broad-stick-to-golf.html
But, I digress --
For DrupalEd 6.0 (coming to the Interwebs near you when the all the contrib modules stabilize) there will be a complete overhaul of the D5 package. Hopefully, over the next few days I'll have the time to organize my ideas in a more coherent way.
Also, a few other comments in this thread point to user interface issues -- we have been solving this in a few ways -- custom blocks with role-specific visibility, the Jump module, and big icons for frequently used tasks -- in short, we tend to remove as many options possible from the UI, and then add in only the options people need in the spots where they need them.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Latest release of DrupalED
The demo site is of DrupalED is here : http://drupaled.alphabetademo.org/.
However the latest release is date of april 2007. I don't know if it works on top of Drupal 6 yet.
Anyone here knows anything about it (Bill) ?
I'd be interested in it, since I'm probably going to work on a website for my wife (she's studying to be a teacher, and building a blog is part of their homework).
Improving UI
I've been working on a site for my school and a major barrier/hurdle has been improving and simplifying the UI so that it is much clear how to create content, approve new users, moderate content, add events, etc.... I've had to create a simplified and aggregated 'back-end' and hide the real back end from all but the highest level administrative users.
Maybe an install profile should be created where this is done already?
Dave
Install profile with simplified UI
My thoughts exactly. And, while we're at it, why not incorporate that instal profile in DrupalEd so everyone benefits from it.
Can you give us the code you used for that interface, so we can use it as a starting point ?
Profile != code
What I did was, using the Panels module, build a dashboard page with numerous blocks, each of which was set for a particular user role. Inside each block I put navigation menus to the administrative items that user role would be able to do. I also created a tabbed page where I presented the content that user had created so they could easily come back to edit their work (without having to hunt for the page in the menus or a separate view).
I guess it would be possible to create a module that would do this automatically. Check off user roles, create a settings page to keep track of what should be displayed, display the menu links organized by module that are provided to that user. Would be nice to be able to group menu items by type though (create content links would get spread out if the admin page was organized by module).
Any ideas? Maybe a mock-up so we know what we are aiming for?
Nice interface mockup
I could work on something basic (just blocks) in inskscape next week.
Could you send us a screen capture of your interface, so I can use it as a starting point ?
It could make a very nice module, usable for many people.
By the way, I found the Drupal Administration menu (http://drupalmodules.com/module/drupal-administration-menu), wich is a bit different but would potentially help users, because it simply gives them access to admin tasks from any page once they're logged in.
interesting idea
The admin menu is essential for me. It's one of the first modules I install. It comes close to making Drupal admin look as cool as Joomla.
Perhaps we could extend it to support multiple admin menus, each tied to a particular role, school admin, teachers, librarians, office staff, calendar volunteer, etc.
Our sorry attempt
Just thought I would share our little attempt to provide a simplified interface for our K-12 librarians who use our sites.
We tried to keep it to a one page panel with the main administrative functions that they would need as well as some block views of content that is waiting their moderation.
The feedback has been that there is still too much on the page. As we prepare a newer version, I think tabbed pages with less on a page would be more usable. But I am very interested in seeing what comes from this conversation.
Can we brainstorm an initial feature set for an install profile?
I'm wondering what the common requirements are for 80% of our school sites. Here's my very rough shot at a simple spec that I hope is a good starting point. Would this be a good initial profile for your school site?
Moved this into a Wiki page
Let's continue the discussion of features for an 'ideal' school profile here.
http://groups.drupal.org/node/15362
Screen shot of my admin menu
This is what I am using for my school. Users are assigned access to these blocks based on user role.
Model for simple dashboard
Hi there,
as promised, here is a rough model of the kind of stuff I see for a simplified dashboard : http://sandgarden.org/uploads/drupal_dashboard/sketch1_drupal_dashboard....
It is limited in features, on purpose.
The goal is to put all the stuff user actually need the most together at the same place, so we get the simplest interface possible for "basic" users.
Also, I tried to put the most useful things in the first tab.
Everyone is welcome to download the files and modified them, I put them in a .zip file here : http://sandgarden.org/uploads/drupal_dashboard/drupal_dashboard.zip
Don't hesite to critizise it and add your ideas.
Sorry for this late post,
Sorry for this late post, but I just joined the group and am very interested in seeing other people's ideas of dashboards and usability in generel. Your links are broken, is there still a chance to see you work?