https://www.e-education.psu.edu/facdev/drupal_tips
Another unit at Penn State started building out a "Drupal tips" site and I wanted to put a notice out on here about it. It's got a lot of tips for how to effectively use different modules for educational purposes. It also has some walk throughs for things that non-admins might want to know how to do like "How do I make a page that students can edit in the course" how to use hovertips / tooltips js modules effectively and things like that. It's an ever growing resource that they are building for their IDs / instructors to reference as they build out course content (they have upwards of 50 courses delivered via Drupal) so it'll be growing in the future.
Could be a good starting point for pointing your end-users to at some point if they are doing content editing.
Comments
Isn't this too complicated ?
This is great for user who are keen on web learning, and already kind of know they way around Drupal.
However, I'm wondering wether all these tips actually make sense for the average teacher. For instance, in the first paragraph you mention the "FCKEditor toolbar". How is an average teacher supposed to know what the FCKEditor is ? Why should they even care ? As far as I'm concerned, a simple screen capture should do the trick here. Better yet, not giving the option of having a bigger design erea, and just adjusting the size of the FCKEditor to be the same as the final content is going the be displayed. Users don't need feature the don't really, really need.
Isn't it our job as Drupal developers to adapt the system to the users, instead of doing the opposite (providing tutorials in order to turn educators into Drupal users) ?
Seems to me that a good eLearning/educational website wouldn't even need to mention that it runs on Drupal. It would just work as it is and make sense.
I think this is the major issue of Drupal : its lack of usability. As we discussed before in another thread, design (in the real sense of the word, not as in solely decorative design) is a key issue we need to solve in Drupal if we want our favorite system to go forward in the education field (and others).
I actually submitted a model for a more useable dashboard, but didn't get any feedback yet. It is imperfect and incomplete, but I strongly believe it is the way to go (because it's the way many other CMS like ExpressionEngine and WordPress use, and they seem to be very popular, especially for bloggers. There's gotta be a reason for that). It just needs you guys' feedback for improvement.
The idea is to group and hierarchise essential features of Drupal in a way that makes sense for average, non-techie users. The downside of this approach is that you loose some of the non-essential features, but I think one of the problem Drupal has for regular users is the plethora of overwhelming stuff you can do with it. It's too confusing.
This is what I think, what my small experience with clients and CMSs taught me, feel free to destroy my opinion and show us what your experience showed.
I didn't write the tutorial, just pointing to it :P
Our ID's in that College that's writing the tutorial as well as our own both know what Drupal is and need at least some knowledge of how to use it to know what's possible. I agree with you that usability is a HUGE concern and I've tried to overcome it with the following project I wrote that centralizes a lot of common ID / instructor design / structure of content for a course. It's called the Outline Designer and it's been designed for people without Drupal knowledge to use and modify a Drupal site's content.
I like the approach you're taking as well, I think it could be a good supplement for a project like the outline designer as we have some more advanced users who want to just go to a high level, sorting console of content. There's a demo you can log into and play with it yourself if you want: http://elearning.psu.edu/demo/elms/outline_designer
Let me know what you think but I've been able to get 2 colleges at Penn State on board with Drupal because of this project and maaaaaaany others interested too as a result of this usability improvement.
"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/
I love it
Hi, I love the Outine designer !
It's exactly the kind of easy interaction I would love to see more in Drupal.
It would probably work great in combination with my "dashboard" idea.
We should definitely try working implementing the Dashboard and the Outline designer together.
One huge issue fot that, though : the way I see it, Dashboard will rely heavily on the menu system. Problem is, between Drupal 5 and 6 the menu system is entirely different, so we would need to have either a Drupal 6 version of the outline designer, or a Drupal 5 version of the dashboard.
Honestly I don't know how I'm going to find the time to implement the dashboard module anyway, so we'll have to see how things work.
Starting work on 6 shortly
Starting work on 6 shortly... hopefully today actually :). The menu system is different (completely) but at least the saving grace of my project is that it's based off of books. I found a cool little hack yesterday that if you write the book's generated menu name into the menus registry that you can then use book managed / generated structures in the menu projects like DHTML and Nice Menus!! Outline Designer will utilize this "hack" to bring book structure and navigation even closer together then they already are :). Keep eyes on the outline designer project as I'm working on a port to D6 and hopefully I can get 'er figured out soon (the other ones didn't take long to port).
"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/
Re:Starting work on 6 shortly
That's awsome. It's very motivating to exchange with such a smart an enthusiastic community !
Well said. Every sentence gold.
Drupal has great functions because it's managed by PHP coders.
Drupal has a poor interface because it's managed by PHP coders.
It seems that most Drupellers soon learn to tweak the URL directly to get what they want rather than navigate the interface. That's a sure sign of a logical set of functions, and a clumsy interface.
With CCK in core, and the rapid development of Views and Panels, I think a new era for Drupal is approaching. The need for every Drupal site builder to be a solid PHP programmer is passing away. The common excuse that the interface is clunky because Drupal is so powerful will fade with it.
Only a developer-centric project would add paragraphs of explanation to forms, often pushing the form itself "below the fold" on an average user's monitor. That might be great for 'inline' documentation, and I'm guessing that's the concept it evolved out of, but I think it's not good interface design.