I've been playing with the idea of using Drupal as a content management system for Educational content, thinking of any multipage content from a few pages of formatted notes to accompany a lecture to 100+ page online textbooks. I know there are a number of great projects out there that cover this to varying extents, so I didn't want to reinvent what they have done but to look at what might enhance this part of their functionality.
One common feature is that most of these systems use the Drupal Books module to organise the pages of their multi-page content aggregates. So I'm sitting thinking about a student interacting with content in a book on a Drupal site. How can I enhance their experience. I came up with:
1: Allow the Book to be inserted into the LMS which is likely to be a non-Drupal system.
2: Make the book reading touch/mobile friendly, a little like an e-reader.
3: Allow the Student to download the Book as an ePub so they can put it in their cloud and make it part of their personal library.
For the answer to 1, see the LTI Tool Provider module that I have been working on.
3 is still on my "to investigate" list, and I don't know when I'll get to it, but there are some parts of the puzzle already available in the epub export module and the print module.
Today I've just uploaded to git the work I've been doing on 2. you can find it in my Book Slider sandbox.
It still has some rough edges, thus the sandbox, but it makes navigating Drupal books on my android phone and iPad a very different experience from a normal drupal site. I even prefer it on my desktop to the standard book navigation.
I'd love feedback and ideas for how best to make this into something that all Drupal education oriented sites can use.
Comments
Sounds like we have a lot of
Sounds like we have a lot of potential overlap as far as the book's for drupal online textbooks matter is involved. Might be related to the fact that I'm using your LTI module and looking like champ for doing so but that's a different story ;)
Here are some book related modules that I use to help our instructional design team author / display drupal based content in books:
http://drupal.org/project/outline_designer - Structure, add to, and generally manage books a lot faster via a UI overlay to the book module.
http://drupal.org/project/book_touch - Book specific implementation of thumbnav (http://drupal.org/project/thumbnav) which is for mobile browsing of books. Basically it's adding a wrapper to any theme to provide a "mobile" friendly version which then has next / back arrows.
http://drupal.org/project/quojs - Thumbnav has support for this js library but you can do some really cool things with it in general since it's a mobile / touch based event detection library.
http://drupal.org/project/book_copy - Copy parts (or entire) outlines. Still needs some love but it's on my roadmap to clean up further since I have co-maintainer on it.
Menu block module is also nice for working with Book trees since book uses the menu system for rendering.
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/
I'm also thinking that spark
I'm also thinking that spark will make a big difference to the authoring experience of Drupal ebooks. I've just been reading that future epub standard will allow epubs to talk LTI to submit outcomes from students doing the exercises in the epub. No need for the LMS to host content for students at all.
JZ
LCAS
Hey, jzornig! There's a learning content authoring system (LCAS) group that's about the content side of courses. "No need for the LMS to host content for students at all" is the direction we seem to be heading.
The group is at http://groups.drupal.org/learning-content-authoring-system .
Kieran Mathieson
kieran@dolfinity.com
The Blech Module
We've spent a lot of time over the years wrestling with the Book module, and have finally left it behind in D7, in favor of entity references.
The epub export module gets you both ePub 3 and .mobi formats.
We have also built Zoundation, a base theme that incorporates Foundation; this helps with making sure that everything works, and is responsive out of the box. quo.js looks interesting as well.
We are going to be releasing an install profile that is focused on the authoring experience pretty soon - we are hosting a series of authoring events (including one coming up in San Francisco) and we are looking to have an initial release out prior to that event.
FunnyMonkey
@bonobo You have been
@bonobo You have been wrestling with the Book module. Can you please tell us more about the problems you were facing?
Longer conversation...
... that goes back to Drupal 5, but the short version:
The book/menu integration was difficult when using books that had any kind of publishing workflow on pages within a book;
Keeping access control synched within a book posed usability issues
Book was great when you only needed exactly what book offered; extending book was often problematic.
Much of the book terminology was confusing to end users who weren't familiar with Drupal.
Much of the core book UI was confusing to end users.
The default Book navigation was offputting to end users.
This is a short list, and it's possible to work around many of these items. But, every site would require a different version of the workaround, and after a while, we asked the question: "Is it better to use book and strip out what we don't need, or is it better to start with something simple, and add what we do need?"
For our work, after working in Drupal and with the Book module starting in 4.6, we found the second path made more sense.
FunnyMonkey
More about entity references?
@bonobo - I'm curious about using entity references. We've used it several times to link content together (related recipes, videos, etc) but I haven't used it yet to build something like a book, course, or curriculum.
Now I have a need to build out a course in Drupal with this structure:
course > sections > content
I want to keep things simple and use views to do most of the work.
I'm curious if you're using using entity references for that sort of thing?
drupal for course and learning content management
My company just built a Drupal application for our eLearning business. We use it build / manage online programs > courses > lessons > screens > content = text / data / media. I just demo'd it online y'day for some other eLearning companies. If you're interested I can get you a link to the recorded demo, or walk you through it sometime. We used a combination of entity references, nodequeues, field collections, views, the media module, etc. It's still a work in progress, but it's working for us. We felt like we couldn't expand our business without it.
Exactly the structure we have
Hello, Dave,
That is exactly the structure we're using. On a client project, we built courses (that learners can complete for certificates) that use entity references to structure the course content.
Quizzes are used within courses to do pre and post-knowledge checks.
The course content (minus quizzes) can also be downloaded as epub and mobi.
There is a DrupalCon proposal about this project: http://portland2013.drupal.org/session/drupal-based-learning-system-glob...
When the site launches (which will be happening very soon) I can talk about the details, and do up some screencast..
FunnyMonkey
@tewnet - yes, if you can get
@tewnet - yes, if you can get me a link, or if not, if you can give me a short demo, I'd be very interested in seeing what you've put together.
There are so many powerful modules, and so many possible approaches, that it's a little overwhelming to figure out a solution that works well today and is well positioned for the future.
Let me know how best to contact you or feel free to contact me using the contact form here on drupal (I think that works, but I've never used it)
Me 2!
@tewnet - I'd like to see that too. Probably a bunch o' humans in this group would be interested.
Kieran Mathieson
kieran@dolfinity.com