Drupal for Education Crushes WebCT

08.07.2005

This may be the most significant endorsement of Drupal I've ever seen. Charlie Lowe just asked his Technical writing class to give an end of course evaluation comparing Drupal and WebCT. For those of you with sex lives, WebCT is a proprietary CMS for education that costs roughly $5000.00 a year, not including support fees. Drupal on the other hand is a completely free, and open source CMS that can be used for everything from education to politics to pornography. () Asked his students to "Reflect on your experience using Drupal (the software running the course website) in comparison to your previous experiences using WebCT in your classes".

Over 90 percent of students perferred drupal to WebCT. While the overwhelming support for drupal over WebCT is suprising in itself; its particularly suprising in light of the fact that educators have had so little time to adapt drupal to their needs. No doubt, many educators will take note of this. In addition, I have no doubt the academic community will welcome a chance to work in collaboration to develop their own open-source learning tools. Provided that University administrators (a.k.a. "idiots") don't interfere with instructors that want to move to open source, I think we'll see an expontential rate of adoption of drupal for education. I'm personally very excited to see how it evolves over the next few years. I dream of an open and free infastructure dedicated to providing everyone with the same knowledge, and opprotunities for self-education that can be found in universities (but that's for a whole nuther' blog post). This platform might provide a good first step for that.

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Comments

Tue, 2005-10-25 16:03 — Friend (not verified)

CMS for Education Lacks substance

There's a revolution on the horizon; one that will transform the ways in which we educate, learn and communicate. I have found CMS for Education (such as WebCT, Blackboard and CourseCompass) lack a certain substance. Traditionally, these systems have been developed as a tool for teaching (as opposed to a tool for educating), useful for the professor, but what about the end user? The Student?

I have just recently begun working with Drupal, and already see the value behind it. Built on CSS, with an incredible community of activists and concerned citizens, Drupal is a system for communication. What I lack in understanding the intricacies of how Drupal works, I make up for with tenacity. I believe ordinary people may organize the flow of information to suit their interests and desires.

I live in New Hampshire. Beginning early in 2007, the worlds attention will begin to shift in our direction in anticipation of the 2008 Presidential Election. The emphasis this next round will be tremendous. The opportunity to debut new ideas will be unprecedented as the flow of media-rich information has never been more accessible by ordinary people.

My ambitions reach well beyond the 2008 elections, and education is a key factor in how a nation such as this with progress and evolve. Keep building examples of how the student benefits. After all, we're all students of life. And learning is a life-long pursuit.

Thank you

Tue, 2005-10-18 12:35 — Joakim (not verified)

Drupal VS WebCT

I'm a student att HÃ¶gskolan in BorÃ¥s, Sweden and HÃ¶gskolan i BorÃ¥s uses WebCT among other pointless systems. But, the most interesting thing about your article for me is that I found out that WebCT is so expensive. Most of our teachers doesn't even put anything up on WebCT, they use the LAN instead. I think I'm gonna tell them to try drupal instead and save some money. The school in general haven't found out that there is something called GPL and Open Source...and they run som heavyshit Information Technology educationprograms... Cheers!

Fri, 2005-08-26 12:08 — pz (not verified)

drupal over webct

While I, too, prefer Drupal to WebCT (heck, anything is better than WebCT), I'd take the results of such surveys with a grain of salt. All teachers know that students sometimes tend to say what we want. In spite of that, I, too, can attest that the learning curve for Drupal is short and that my students were using it proficiently after just a couple of hours. pz

Sat, 2005-08-27 00:21 — Nick Lewis

Heh... you academic types --

Heh... you academic types -- always insisting upon "fully supported arguments"... I'm a blogger for crying out loud. I don't need to make "sound claims" --for I have attitude! (j/k)

That is -- true, sometimes students say what teachers want to hear -- provided they like the teacher. But conversely, sometimes students can get really unruly, and no matter what the teacher does, they'll hate it. In the end however, the fact is that an overwelming majority of the students hands down preferred drupal -- the open source alternative -- to the expensive proprietary solution. Their reasons for liking drupal -- no less -- were specific, relevent, and fully consistant with my own experiences (and I imagine others) with drupal. Moreover, regardless of learning curves (which drupal appears to be much less steep), there is an obvious benefit in teaching students a generic system that they will likely have to deal with in the future -- as opposed to making them learn some boxy inflexiable system that they'll use once in Freshman English, and never again. My two cents at least.