By mathieso on

I'm Kieran Mathieson, assoc prof at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, USA. I'm in the business school at OU. I'm a mix of geek, educator, and business person.

A couple of weeks ago, I was appointed director of the ATiB (Applied tech in business) program. It's an intensive IT program for all business majors (accounting, marketing. management, etc.). An add-on (module?) for their degree. ATiB has special IT courses, plus project work for local companies. ATiB's goal is to train accountants, marketers, etc., who can use IT in their areas.

I'm moving the program from pure Microsoft tech to a mix of MS and Drupal. There'll be Drupal coursework, and projects using Drupal to create things for companies.

I'm also thinking of linking with local chambers of commerce and helping their small businesses learn how to do Drupal. That's in the future, though.

I'm looking for suggestions for the program, on a number of fronts.

Topics to teach

They are business students, though bright ones with some tech skill. But I won't be teaching them module development. They will know some HTML, JS, CSS, and PHP, but not much. Enough to customize some things, but that's it. The program will focus on using Drupal to meet business goals.

I want them to know how to model business processes with Drupal, the sort of things you do with CCK, views, workflow, and rules. This use of Drupal is not well known enough, IMHO. Drupal could see more adoption in corporate places if they knew you can model business objects with Drupal. I don't see a lot of articles or books on business modeling with Drupal, although maybe they exist (please let me know if they do).

Students will also create the types of Drupal sites we're more used to talking about in Drupalville. Pages, stories, and such. Forums, social media links. The sort of thing a small to medium sized company might use for their public-facing site, some internal sites (e.g., employee training sites), like that.

Services to use

We are not going to run any servers ourselves. We could use regular hosting accounts, but I was thinking that services like Buzzr and Drupal Gardens might be better places to start. If we ever get the local small business Drupal community off the ground, they could get started with those services as well.

If humans from those services are listening, please contact me if we can talk about special deals.

Books and stuff

Recommendations? Since these are students, cheap is good.

Getting students to contribute to Drupal

I will require students to contribute to the Drupal community. What should those contributions be? Patches are out. Maybe documentation? Maybe writing up Drupal case studies? Testing? Any others?

TMI!

This post is too long already. You can learn more about the program at http://atib.sba.oakland.edu. It's an icky table-based ASP site that I will rebuild one day. But the home page should tell you enough about the program.

Suggestions welcome!

Kieran
mathieso@oakland.edu

Comments

bojanz’s picture

bojanz commented

This sounds fantastic.

As far as contributions are concerned, I think it would be great to hear about their experience with Drupal, and to have the unclear/missing parts of the documentation identified and fixed.
That would lower the barrier of entry for the next generation of students entering such programs ( and for people entering Drupal in general).

Good luck!

heather’s picture

heather commented

Sounds like a great introduction for these students. Microsoft has great products, but they'll gain more from a diverse experience.

I'm curious- how many credits is this course? Is it over the course of one year? One term? How many hours per week/how many total?

If you're just proposing the course now, when will you be delivering it? If it's not until spring or autumn of 2011, the books available will change considerably. You may also opt to develop on Drupal 7.

I like the idea of using the hosted services for this group, as they'd likely not benefit from the technicalities of hosting & maintenance. Drupal Gardens would be an excellent platform, and I'd love to see how you could use it in an education context. I don't know Buzzr as well at this stage. I think DrupalGardens makes less assumptions, so it's more flexible... which also implies that it's more complex.

I like the idea that they'll be doing things within their local community as well. You might find it useful for project based work, and do portfolio based assessment.

In terms of contributions: it's interesting that making learning material is a great learning experience. You could train them in making screencasts and have one of their assessments be a submitted screencast. It's a good professional practice; ticks alot of Bloom's taxonomy too :)

And on a side note, I know of a researcher who is working on something related to business modelling. He is researching modelling process flows, and having the relationship data semantically described. If I dare to sound like I know what I'm talking about, I don't. This is my rough transmission. Check out some of the research in Business Process Management at DERI in NUI Galway, Ireland:
http://usoa.deri.ie/ Service Oriented Architecture Unit

Please do pop over into the Curriculum and Training group if you want to discuss the minutae of learning activities, assessment, etc. Would be fun to chat.

- Heather