I am the web development specialist for the Masters in Education: Teaching and Learning program at St. Mary's University of Minnesota. Currently our website is in perl and is a mess to maintain. With what the program would like to do with the website in the future, we are re-building the website using Drupal 6. I was going to scratch-code PHP for our specific needs, but Drupal offered so much more than I could hope to code myself.
Our program is community based. Our students meet once a month on a weekend at a location near them for a total of 20 weekends. We send out teachers to these locations to facilitate the sessions. We normally have between 10 to 15 communities running at one time. Each community has 4 projects due per semester and then 3 main projects due at the end of the program as pre-requisites for graduation.
In addition to these location based communities we have on-line communities based on teaching subject.
I have already started the process of developing our new site in Drupal. It is early in the process and I wanted to share what I have done and get some feedback on if I am going in the right direction and if not what should I be looking at and what ideas any of you might have.
I am using OG to define each location based community and each teaching subject community.
I have roles for program staff, students and teachers.
I have a calendar to list all the meeting weekends.
I have created a content-type for a community weekend where the teacher can describe what they are going to cover that weekend.
Some stumbling blocks I am facing:
As OG is Organic Groups and not Organic Communities, the word Groups appears in navigation (breadcrumbs) where I want Communities to appear.
I am not sure how to structure for the projects that students must submit. I want to create something where the student can post their work and then the teacher can at a glance see what students have or have not submitted work.
I want to create calendars for each community but share data with the main calendar. As we have many communities that meet on the same weekend, creating separate dates for each would create a calendar that is full of duplicate entries. I have created a content-type for weekend dates and used Node Reference to connect them to the community weekend content-type. My issue is that a community weekend node only contains a link to the referenced weekend date node and not the date information itself so that it can be shown on a calendar operating on community weekend nodes.
I want the community main page to show only the next scheduled community weekend node. Currently it is just the main node for the OG that defines the community and shows all weekends created in order of creation not the date of the actual meeting.
I want to create a spot for students to upload work in progress.
I need the ability for students to periodically submit evaluations of their teachers and of the program. And for the teachers to see the evaluations results of just their students and for Staff to see results of everything.
The program managers really want a spot for students to personalize their profile page.
Thank you for any suggestions.