DrupalEd is released

When we taught Five Weeks to a Social Library, we used Drupal and kind of had to hack it to make it work as a course management system. Too bad DrupalEd wasn’t out yet. But it is now!

The goal of this site is to create a flexible framework that allows for users to set up a social learning environment or a more traditional learning environment depending on the needs of the learners within the site. With this current framework, both approaches are supported.

So cool! But you may get even more excited when you check out some of these features:

# a personal workspace;
# a group workspace;
# the ability for site members to create informal working groups;
# the ability to create formal class spaces;
# a podcasting platform;
# a WYSIWYG text editor;
# wiki functionality;
# personal and class blogs;
# rss feeds for the entire site, individual courses, individual terms, and individual users;
# personal image galleries;
# personal file repositories;
# the ability to create private, invitation-only groups;
# social bookmarking, with searching within bookmark descriptions;
# spam protection;
# assignment calendars by course;
# event calendars for site-wide events;
# configurable user profiles with searchable text descriptions;
# the ability to create lists of “friends” among site members

This is what open source is all about, isn’t it? I’m thrilled to see tools like Drupal, WordPress and more being adapted for educational use. We can’t all afford things like WebCT and Angel, and frankly, most of us don’t want to use them. Drupal sure was a lot easier to manage than WebCT!