Posted by crimsondryad on March 30, 2012 at 3:03am
hi, I was at the drupalcon Lms bof. We are building our Lms in drupal, but my company wants to be sure we made the right choice. Tell me your stories about Drupal as an LMS ( esp K-12 ). How many students do you have using your site? How many concurrently? How does it scale? How did you implement flash for classroom activities and how are you implementing tests / content in Drupal? Is it scalable ( I know the answer to this....but they require proof ).
Do you have any suggested resources or reading we could do on this topic?
Comments
I can't speak much for the
I can't speak much for the LMS functionality, but I can speak to the scalability of Drupal.
Some of the largest sites in the world are run on Drupal. Al Jazeera, Examiner, Data.gov, FCC.gov, Whitehouse.gov, Warner Bros., Sony BMG, etc. The list goes on and on. This should speak very heavily to the scalability and versatility of Drupal.
I've had the opportunity to work on some of the portal features for Johns Hopkins, which was an exciting project and a relatively early adoption. Even in D6, we supported an enterprise infrastructure (pressflow) that cleanly integrated into their custom constituency database. D7 and pressflow both support data replication and integrate well with Varnish (reverse proxy caching).
I'd be happy to answer any specific enterprise drupal questions if need be.
Suggested reading --
Suggested reading -- btopro.com is where I've been keeping a pulse on education usage of drupal for the last two years.
We use Flash / Smart Builder apps to talk to Drupal using http://drupal.org/project/user_progress which can also help generate statistics about page views and video analytics. We also more generally have drupal setup as an asset management system (2011 award winner)
Our current Drupal learning setup has somewhere around 50-100 concurrent users and about 3-4k students per semester (nothing major) but we haven't had issues of scale and are running on pretty minimum specs stuff (dual core blade server as part of a virtual cluster, 1 gig of ram i think). Also some of our courses have students communicating back and forth a lot and submitting photos for assignments / community critique. (2010 award winner)
You can get a starting point for a lot of our work @ elms.psu.edu or drupal.org/project/elms or email me for specific questions about things we've had to face. Best decision I think I ever made was selecting drupal for what we do though I've seen a lot of clients / colleagues mash drupal and moodle together when pushed up against the wall. There are also some modules / techniques to help do this as needed and might not be a bad bridge should you run into a "must have" from moodle / established php lms platforms.
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/