ELMS

Just figured I'd drop a line here. The first theme to be published on drupal.org as a result of the ELMS project has been released. This will effectively replace all of our default course themes that we roll out. I figured I'd share as it was developed specifically for the educational sector of the drupal community.

http://drupal.org/project/chamfer

I haven't seen any discussion about Book usability on here yet it's one of the highlighted topics for things that need to be patched in Drupal 7 usability. Does anyone have any thoughts on how Books can be improved. I have a whole module dedicated towards Book usability improvements and while the project as a whole I'm sure implements a bit too much to be rolled into core, it does have a lot of features which make using books in Drupal faster and MUCH more user-friendly thanks to outline designer, thickbox, prepopulate and the ajax modules.

Just wanted to reference a post I made today about the infrastructure that I've recently setup to make our Drupal "stack" into a scalable e-learning architecture that supports self-site / course creation as well as pervasive user accounts and centralized user management (I can't think of any other buzz words at the moment :) ).

https://elearning.psu.edu/projects/node/131 -- infrastructure / multi-site stuff

https://elearning.psu.edu/projects/node/129 -- screencast / course manager module

https://elearning.psu.edu/projects/node/130 -- outline designer

I've been working on a port of the Outline Designer module to Drupal 6 and it's almost ready for release. I've got a demo up of the current progress / direction that the project is taking but it's drastically changed since the Drupal 5 version; both architecturally and in terms of usability. It now piggy-backs functionality of the Ajax, Book, and Thickbox modules. You can check out the demo / screencast below. Feedback is muuuuuch appriciated as this module is still geared towards making Drupal more usable for the education crowd.

I've been working on a project to make the structuring of content easier / more intuitive. The module was called the Outline Designer and now there's a Drupal 6 version out now. Please check out the demo below and let me know what you think. It implements a bunch of usability things I've been seeing thrown around on here as well as introduces some new concepts (like a context menu). It integrates / overrides the admin/content/book interface to add ajax elements such as deletion, add a child, content editing, and renaming.

Demo - https://elearning.psu.edu/demos/outline_designer/

The outline designer has been posted to drupal.org ( http://drupal.org/project/outline_designer ).

This is the first module in an installation profile which will be ELMS - e-Learning Management System. More information about the ELMS project see the ELMS attack plan posted on the e-Learning Institute's projects site.

So I showed off a veerrrryyy brief presentation of ELMS and the Assignment Studio yesterday but we're working on A LOT of other projects / related projects. So, tonight around 7pm some of us are going to meet up to discuss ELMS and our initiatives at PSU in greater detail. The hope of this discussion is to try and get edu focused developers excited about this direction and start coming up with an attack plan for future development. This product will be available on drupal.org as soon as it's legal (http://drupal.org/project/elms just a name space at the moment and small description).

So, after watching the State of the Drupal presentation and seeing the over-arching directions for the "killer release" version 7, I decided that I should throw some ideas out there. I work for Penn State and more specifically, work on making Drupal more usable for non-drupal users (specifically as it relates to education and online course design). This is where ELMS comes in. ELMS stands for E-Learning Management System and has been developed "for instructional designers, by instructional designers".

Now, I don't mean for this to sound like a plug for a product (cause it's not), I've been developing Drupal modules to help support the development of our e-learning courses at Penn State for the last year now. As things have progressed, our department has begun to pursue making these modules open source. I've been sitting on this stuff for a year now patiently waiting for the right time to start announcing the projects we've been working on and I think many (if not all of them) would be of interest to DrupalEd users.