Teaching Writing, Collaboration, and Engagement in Global Contexts: The Drupal Alternative to Proprietary Courseware

In English at Purdue, we are running mostly class sites or other community sites to support teaching (although we hope to do more work with department/program sites). So no LDAP support. Students self register; teachers leave registration open on the site the first week of class and then close it off. Politically, this is actually much easier than trying to get permission to authenticate usernames and passwords through the main IT system.

Because these are class sites, we also have not had any real need yet to integrate with any enterprise apps (although, one day I would love to be able to integrate Flash Communication Server). And no interest in integrating with WebCT at all (for the reasons mentioned in the presentation).

The sites--approximately 50 (some active, some test sites for teachers experimenting with Drupal)--are administered by the department (mostly me, not IT) on an Athlon64 3ghz with 1.5gig RAM using the 64bit version of SuSE 9.1. The server is so far way under utilized .

ITaP, Purdue's centralized IT support, is one of the largest WebCT installations in the US. They are curious about Drupal, but promote WebCT. They are supportive in spirit, but not in the area of technical support. So politics have not been an issue for us as far as using it as a teaching tool. Purdue has a lot of people interested in and working with open source. For example, you'll find that Purdue is one of the mirrors for Gentoo Linux and many other Linux distributions.

As far as modules for 4.5.x

• blog, story, forums--I typically recommend that teachers not run all three as it fragments the discourse on the site
• notify--useful for any site for a teacher/administrator to receive notices of new content
• tracker
• polls--some teachers like to use polls since students can cast a vote anonymously
• urlfilter
• trackbacks--currently trackbacks could be a potential problem because of trackback spam; autodiscovery is one of those great features that unfortunately has some undesirable consequences
• contact--i've pulled the 4.6 module to use with 4.5.x
• localization--for changing Drupal hard-coded text
• book--for posting course syllabi and other materials; I recommend teachers use it for *all* course materials since it collates and organizes everything well
• menu
• mail--great replacement for using a listserv merely as an announcement list
• htmlarea--although I personally prefer not to use it because of some problems with older browsers

We have not been using the taxonomy system to tag and organize posts (only with forums). My experience in the past is that students are not very good at tagging blog posts with an appropriate category.

All of the class sites for this semester are running off a multisite configuration, advantages being only one codebase to maintain, slightly easier installation, and a little less disk drive space.