Announcing a New Book: Drupal in Education and E-Learning

Bill Fitzgerald, of FunnyMonkey, has written Drupal for Education and E-learning, due out from Packt Publishing in late October. Targeted for Drupal 6, this book covers how to set up community sites to support interactive teaching and learning. This book gives an overview of the functionality of Drupal core, and then gives precise instructions on using CCK, Views 2, Organic Groups, and a range of other contributed modules to extend the functionality of your site.

This book is written with the needs of educational users in mind, but the information in this book can be useful for site administrators, or for people looking to build a community/social networking site in Drupal. The instructions in this book are geared toward end users and site administrators, and do not require any knowledge of PHP. This book fits cleanly between the development and theming guides that have been published recently, and provides a resource for people looking to hone their site administration skills.

For people new to Drupal, the book includes details on:

• Drupal terminology;
• User creation;
• Role based access control;
• Installing modules and themes;
• Backing up and upgrading your site;

For more experienced Drupallers, the book covers:

• Using CCK to extend content types -- instructions cover sharing media, images, links, text, and files;
• An overview of Views 2, including adding new views, using the new access control mechanisms of Views 2, configuring multiple displays from a single view, and cloning and modifying existing views;
• An overview of Organic Groups, including instructions on how to use groups to support informal and formal learning;
• Extending user profiles to support connections between users.

The book also covers theming basics, and how to use the menu and block system to create sites that are easy and intuitive to navigate.

This book could not have been written without the support and help of fellow primates Marc Poris and Jeff Graham -- their feedback on the in-progress text helped immeasurably. Also, technical editors Peter Wolanin, Joel Farris, and Michael Peacock have provided great feedback that has helped drive the final revision process.

About the author

Bill Fitzgerald worked in education for 16 years before starting FunnyMonkey with Marc Poris in 2004. Bill has been active in the Drupal community since early 2005. As part of FunnyMonkey, Bill has helped develop sites for a variety of different learning organizations ranging from Elementary schools to K12 schools to University-level programs to Adult and Continuing Education programs. Bill also started the Drupal in Education group on groups.drupal.org.

Update

09/17/08
Kieran Lal produced a video giving an overview of how Drupal is currently being used in different educational settings:

The range of sites in here is pretty amazing, and shows the variety of ways that Drupal can be used within schools and universities.