Dries Buytaert

This really is a great presentation, this is certainly something I will show to existing and prospect customers.

I wonder where this was presented or what the intent of creating it was? Is Paul Albert using it to encourage departments to use more Drupal?

Here on Brasil there are many Universities using Drupal too. USP (Universidade de São Paulo) one of the biggest here is using Drupal in many of it's departments.

Very interesting. I might use this to see if the University I work at could switch over. Its mostly a Microsoft shop right now. With all the development done in things like Visual Basic and .NET. Still, its worth a shot.

This is indeed an excellent presentation.

I'm biased (I'm at University of Minnesota), but I think there is tremendous potential for Drupal in Higher Education, and it's not just in the area of traditional websites.

Drupal-powered academic communities are beginning to pop-up here and there. We have two major projects under way at the moment at the U of M Libraries.

One is a Gates grant (to launch in the very near future): http://harvestchoice.cs.umn.edu/resources/all also see the presentation we made at the Digital Library Federation:

http://www.slideshare.net/libsys/dlf-h-choice-2008-04

The other is a Mellon project, where we will be making use of the many socially interactive features of Drupal (groups, relationships, profiles, community tags, etc):

http://ethicshare.cs.umn.edu

Both projects are integrated with other FLOSS software (ex Solr, GeoServer, GeoNetwork and so on) to varying degrees, which speaks to Paul's point about how easy it is to get stuff up and running (and maintained, scaled, etc) with Drupal. Both projects require very short development time frames and at the same time demand lots of functionality. Drupal has made it possible to meet these needs.

There just aren't many (any?) good enterprise solutions for community site building; I believe this gives Drupal another competitive advantage over "enterprise" solutions in academic environments where socially interactive spaces are in increasing demand to support scholarship.

We (at Linnovate) have been working for 3 months in a project which is shifting all of Bar Ilan University's future sites to Drupal.

I can verify this is certainly a global trend and that IT and web managers within the universities which take the time to research the options tend to evaluate Drupal as well as a strong contender.

Presentations like these give us (the Drupal shops) extra "firepower" to work with, validating with an "external authority", that what we explain to our prospects is true.
What I like about these types of projects is that they present interesting integration challenges to the existing user base (LDAP integration), existing procedures (workflow, moderation queues, permissions).

We will eventually host a massive multi-site (70-100 sites) operation with installation profiles for the different flavors of departmental sites.

Thanks for the extra "firepower"

Lior

I have recently added a new project to Drupal.org that would seem to be a must for most Universities thinking to do a Drupal intranet site: Plagiarism Checker - Authentication Framework.

Check it out; this is a pretty cool module (even if i do say so myself). Allows professors, editors, etc to check if posted content has been plagiarized. It does this by scouring the net using any of various plugin search API's and doing full page comparisons against the posted content. In the end, coming up with matching URL's that may have been used to copy content.

This project was designed by LiquidCMS and funded by LifeWire, a NY Times Company.

Peter Lindstrom
LiquidCMS - Content Management Solution Experts

Very nice vid.

I teach Content Management Systems at the University College of Drupal. Apart from a healthy dose of theory on the topic of CM, my students also have an equal dose of hands-on classes. Rather than letting them choose a CMS to figure out on their own, I've started making Drupal my obligatory tool of choice to introduce them to content management systems. So as of this summer, about 50 students a year will graduate with a basic knowledge of drupal administration, development and themeing.

The reason for my choice was two-fold. One the one hand I think Drupal is one of the more well-written well-documented systems out there and an ideal, open tool to let young people explore the functions and structure of a CMS. On the other hand, as Drupal is gaining more and more 'street cred' in the professional world out there, it's a skill that could increase our students' value on the job market.

This is a great thread on the many ways that Drupal is being used in academic environments. Drupal use at UW Madison has been skyrocketing for the past couple years. In addition to departmental sites, we're seeing:

• solutions for teachers to share and discuss teaching materials that extend beyond the traditional "learning object repository" and become social platforms for teachers to connect around their teaching
• course collaboration platforms that integrate both blog-like and wiki-like interaction, and provide a much richer and interactive environment than traditional course management systems
• faculty engagement awards with Drupal as a key part of the toolbox

Exciting times!

This is an excellent presentation. Very convincing presentation.