1. Web Content Management for Education and E-learning
Untraditional Open Source Software Solutions
by Kevin Davison

2. by Kevin Davison, TPW 600, Spring 2009
Table of Contents
WRITERS AND EDUCATORS PREFER TO “KEEP IT SIMPLE, SAM” 3
TRADITIONAL APPROACHES FOR WRITERS AND EDUCATORS 3
ONE PROFESSIONAL WRITER’S UNTRADITIONAL APPROACH 4
ONE UNTRADITIONAL APPROACH FOR WRITERS AND EDUCATORS 5
DRUPALED AND THE “FUNNY MONKEY COMMONS” 6
IS OPEN SOURCE AN ADDED BENEFIT OR SETBACK? 6
LMS AND VLE‐SPECIFIC OPTIONS 7
WHO USES DRUPAL? 8
WHAT’S NEXT FOR EDUCATORS, WRITERS, AND THE READERS? 8
RESOURCES 9
2

3. by Kevin Davison, TPW 600, Spring 2009
Writers And Educators Prefer To “Keep It Simple, Sam”
Decisions to use new technology for content management are often made by
technical and professional writers. They often drive initiative to adopt
technology, since their roles have evolved from simply gathering information
from subject matter experts (SME), to using sophisticated software to
publish content online. Technical and professional writers have paved the
way for document tracking, knowledge and learning management, workflow,
and web content management (WCM). The simplest solutions available are
often the first choice for writers, as long as it meets the needs of everyone
involved on the content development team.
Enterprise software solutions often involve high costs toward
implementation and support, which requires engineering resources and
Keep It Simple, Sam.
project management to maintain. With the increasing rate of adoption of
The focus of this whitepaper various open source software solutions, the potential to save more time and
is to introduce non-traditional money is evident. Fewer engineering and management resources are required
open source solutions that fit for proven software systems with packaged solutions for academic and
the requirements of technical career training purposes. This becomes appealing to writers, who prefer
and professional writers for long-lasting solutions that meet the needs of everyone involved with content
the management of content management and document workflow.
used for education and e- Some perceive that open source software lacks the professional or
learning, focusing on Drupal enterprise-level support that large software companies may provide. Many
and DrupalEd. open source communities widely collaborate among their developers and
offer equally sufficient support services, often for free. It’s difficult for those
without experience in the open source community to realize how service can
possibly be offered freely, since private software companies have charged for
every feature and service they possibly can. Companies such as Acquia
provide commercial support for Drupal, rivaling the support structures of
large companies with proprietary software solutions. Open source software is
emerging as an acceptable option for academic and corporate communities
Acquia is a commercial open seeking solutions for online education and e-learning for students and
source software company employees with non-traditional needs.
providing products, services,
There are several popular, open source software packages for Course
and technical support for the
open source Drupal social
Management Systems (CMS), also known as a Learning Management
publishing system. Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) that will be
covered. The focus of this whitepaper is to introduce these non-traditional
open source solutions that fit requirements of technical and professional
writers for the management of content used for education and e-learning,
specifically elaborating on Drupal and DrupalEd.
Traditional Approaches For Writers And Educators
Open source education and e-learning web applications may be good options
for organizations that require flexibility, and modular growth potential.
Technical and professional writers require this to meet demands to provide
3

4. by Kevin Davison, TPW 600, Spring 2009
content quickly, while developed cost effectively. There are many acronyms
for Course Management Systems (CMS), also known as Learning
Management Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), that
relate to online education and e-learning. Many familiar web applications,
including Moodle, Blackboard, Sakai, Claroline, and ATutor provide
packages for academic requirements that lack customizable interface design
and application flexibility. Other web applications offer frameworks that
increase this potential, and may require a little more effort to implement
them to match their full capabilities, while not all organizations require this.
The potential advantages from non-traditional solutions include design
customization with greater community support, application flexibility, and a
modular approach for scalability for potential growth in the number of users
and those who contribute content directly.
One Professional Writer’s Untraditional Approach
Jon Starbuck is a professional writer and author of “Run Your Diesel Vehicle
on Biofuels, A Do-It-Yourself Manual.” He maintains AEES.co.uk for the
Advanced Environmental and Energy Studies (AEES) while continuing his
own education about Renewable Energy Systems Technology (REST) and
attending Loughborough University in the UK remotely. AEES is “the long-
standing and successful MSc held at the Centre for Alternative Technology
(CAT) in Mid Wales.”
AEES.co.uk is based on a non-traditional solution to provide
constructive forums, recent news, document management, a collaborative
Wiki, and general information to its students. Starbuck chose PHP-Nuke for
this environment in 2004, which is an open source Content Management
System (CMS), not a packaged LMS. Loughborough University uses
Moodle, and they cannot be equally compared. Each has its own reasons for
different features, and this isn’t a traditional academic environment. AEES
needed a solution that could be customized and maintained easily by any
content contributor or technical writer.
There are some limitations to this non-traditional approach to
education and e-learning, such as documentation because "coders are rarely
good writers." Starbuck wrote much of the user documentation for CAT
himself. PHP-Nuke provided enough information about its technical
AEES is “the long-standing installation procedures with very little available about user issues and general
and successful MSc held at support procedures. In Starbucks’s experience, a good solution should
the Centre for Alternative provide useful documentation.
Technology (CAT) in Mid Open source software has the reputation of being vulnerable to
Wales.” hackers, and in Starbuck’s experience, “open source concerns include
security flaws, but these holes are often filled and reacted to immediately."
He had one experience where a Developer plugged some security holes, and
it took only an hour of the Developer’s time since there was adequate
technical documentation on PHP-Nuke’s website. The software was also
writing in PHP, which is open source, and simple for most developers to
debug and program. This software, like most open source software, doesn’t
4

5. by Kevin Davison, TPW 600, Spring 2009
require direct involvement from any proprietary software support
department. Anyone can help.
The primary concern with any approach to provide content and
collaboration between students is the missing classroom experience. His
personal experience with this problem is in regards to his current online
enrollment with Loughborough University. The Master’s degree is highly
regarded, though “it lacks the learning experience. I feel very isolated,
ignored, on the sidelines. I don’t feel part of the course and the community.”
Could this experience be improved with better technology? “They do record
the lecture, but usually the quality of the recording is very poor. The audio is
poor, and often the video lacks production quality. What they’re trying to do
is give remotely educated students like me, a ‘fuller experience.’”
Unfortunately, the production quality of video is insufficient in this
case. Essentially, the content is not nearly to the level of quality that the
students can get in person. The multimedia component of any online
education and e-learning system should utilize the best solutions available to
provide quality audio and video to students and employees remotely.
Technical and professional writers must also adopt these methods to provide
multimedia content, not simply written documents to download. Students
“For an open source WCM and employees who aren’t present in the classroom or workplace demand a
vendor to be relevant, it must fuller experience. “It’s not necessarily about the education and e-learning
have a satisfactory product system itself. It’s about the content that’s presented, the quality of the media.
offering, proven enterprise-
As with Starbuck’s current experience, the more he feels like he’s involved
level implementations, and a
large — and passionate — with the education and e-learning, the more he feels part of the community
community of developers and he enjoys sharing.
service providers” Educators, including professional and technical writers, have a
challenge to utilize multimedia along with other written content now that it is
Forrester Research available as a standard to utilize. This is independent of any traditional or
non-traditional education and e-learning system, and is potentially the core
component in some online learning environments. Ultimately, the most
important component in any decision to adopt an LMS, CMS, or VLE is
whether it can provide the best user experience possible. Jon’s experiences
provide a unique perspective with implementing and using two different
systems (PHP-Nuke and Moodle), as a professional writer, and now a
student. The most important factor to him is user experience, not the
technology itself.
One Untraditional Approach For Writers And Educators
“Compared to a traditional Drupal is traditionally considered to be “a free software package that allows
Learning Management an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize
System, Drupal can feel less a wide variety of content on a website” (Drupal.org). Packaged solutions for
restrictive; Drupal has been academic environments like DrupalEd are catching up with traditional
designed to interact with the LMSs, and there is increasing demand for Drupal in the academic
Web, and to make the most community. While most LMSs like Moodle offer "a software package for
of the array of possibilities
producing Internet-based courses and web sites," this tight packaging can
offered by the Internet.”
limit the potential of some e-learning environments that administrators and
Bill Fitzgerald
5

6. by Kevin Davison, TPW 600, Spring 2009
content contributors may want more flexibility with (moodle.org). There are
usually three types of users involved with Drupal sites: readers, content
developers, and site maintainers. Content developers include Technical and
Professional Writers who need a solution to contribute content, manage
content, and distribute it through workflow. The simplest solutions mean the
most to these users, and when site maintainers don’t need to be involved as
often, this reduces cost.
Drupal still lacks the traditional course management framework that
Moodle and other LMSs contain. If course management and formal academic
process is not emphasized for an education and e-learning project, then a
non-traditional approach may be a better option. The non-traditional
approach offers lower costs and flexibility to informal education and e-
learning environments.
DrupalEd And The “Funny Monkey Commons”
DrupalEd is a free, packaged solution from Bill Fitzgerald, author of “Drupal
for Education and E-Learning,” and FunnyMonkey.com. The Funny Monkey
Commons is essentially a paid service for schools and learning
organizations, a personalized version of DrupalEd. Compared to Moodle, it
offers a similar range of features with more individual support.
The goal of DrupalEd, according to Jane Hart, 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.” Knight Hart is the Founder and Editor, Social Media &
Learning Advisor, for the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies.
She considers DrupalEd “as an informal learning site where all users have
“Drupal for Education and E- comparable permissions, or as a more hierarchical learning environment with
learning,” by Bill Fitzgerald
students, teachers, classes, and working groups.” This description covers a
wide range of needs from educational institutions, as well as companies that
need similar features to educate employees.
Is Open Source An Added Benefit Or Setback?
According to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), "stewards of the Open Source
Definition (OSD) and the community-recognized body for reviewing and
approving licenses as OSD-conformant… open source doesn't just mean
access to the source code.” The distribution terms of open-source software
must comply with the following criteria [according to OSI]:
1. Free Redistribution
“As a result, the open source 2. Source Code
model often builds higher 3. Derived Works
quality, more secure, more 4. Integrity of The Author's Source Code
easily integrated software. 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
And it does it at a vastly 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
accelerated pace and often at 7. Distribution of License
a lower cost”. 8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product
Redhat Software
6

7. by Kevin Davison, TPW 600, Spring 2009
9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software
10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral
Open source software, and especially those useful for Education and E-
learning is cost-effective, and beneficial to environments that don’t want to
“The open-source model has rely on proprietary sources all the time. Where proprietary software relies on
a lot to offer the business “secrecy,” this simply means that fewer people know about the flaws
world” because the source is concealed. However, that doesn’t make it any more
secure. Open source software relies on the community to find obvious flaws,
OSI - Open Source Case for
Business
and then fix them immediately. This is possible with so many Developer
eyes constantly watching and testing the source code.
Instead of proprietary software hoarding all the sales and support
services, this is offered to the open source community. The community could
include anyone at the same company or educational institution. This not only
creates jobs, but internal resources that offer better availability and business
memory that can’t be provided by proprietary software services at the same
costs. Open source software facilitates income growth for business that
supports its users, not customers that finance the mega-software company
conversely.
LMS and VLE-specific Options
There are four main open source players, with Moodle in the forefront of the
market share. However, “Other” tends to be the majority leader in this space,
which includes hundreds of other small and custom solutions. SumTotal and
Blackboard other proprietary approaches and do not meet the criteria of open
source software. The following LMS or VLE options will be compared with
the non-traditional approach that Drupal can provide:
San Francisco State Moodle (<http://moodle.org/>)
University students use “Moodle is a software package for producing Internet-based courses
“iLearn,” which is a and web sites. It is a global development project designed to support
customized version of a social constructionist framework of education.”
Moodle for curriculum
management and student Sakai (<http://sakaiproject.org/>)
collaboration. “The Sakai Community develops and distributes the open-source
Sakai CLE, an enterprise-ready collaboration and courseware
management platform that provides users with a suite of learning,
portfolio, library and project tools.”
Claroline (<http://www.claroline.net/>)
“Claroline is an Open Source eLearning and eWorking platform
allowing teachers to build effective online courses and to manage
learning and collaborative activities on the web.”
ATutor (<http://www.atutor.ca/>)
7

8. by Kevin Davison, TPW 600, Spring 2009
“ATutor is an Open Source Web-based Learning Content
Management System (LCMS) designed with accessibility and
adaptability in mind. Administrators can install or update ATutor in
minutes, develop custom themes to give ATutor a new look, and
easily extend its functionality with feature modules. Educators can
quickly assemble, package, and redistribute Web-based instructional
content, easily import prepackaged content, and conduct their courses
online. Students learn in an adaptive learning environment.”
Who Uses Drupal?
Well-known universities like Yale, Harvard, Penn State, Rice, MIT, and
Stanford use Drupal for education and e-learning, or simply to manage
content internally. Organizations like Unicef, The United Nations, PBS,
NATO, Amnesty International, and NASA also utilize Drupal. President
Barak Obama’s administration uses Drupal to help educate the country about
the stimulus plan at www.recovery.gov. Many for-profit companies are
proud to admit using Drupal, even though they may have content
management or educational web applications of their own. Some companies
include Reuters, Yahoo, Adobe, The BBC, Forbes, and Fast Company.
Drupal has its dedicated following, and there are reasons writers, educators,
www.Recovery.gov and other users choose it for education and e-learning purposes.
What’s Next For Educators, Writers, And The Readers?
"24% of LMS owners are This white paper evaluated traditional and untraditional (open source)
currently planning on software solutions for education and e-learning in academic and career
switching platforms." training environments. Some may not consider Drupal as a traditional LMS
or VLE. With the recent declining market share of Blackboard and Moodle,
Learning Management Systems Drupal is being recognized as a valid solution that rivals Moodle, and other
2008: Facts, Practical Analysis, proprietary enterprise solutions for education and e-learning in various
Trends and Vendor Profiles educational and business environments.
Proprietary software can be more expensive than open source
software when considering licensing fees and support costs billed at a
premium. Some consider this price tag the payoff for software that’s labeled
“easy to use,” and supported by certified professional services. This is not
quantifiably the case, as the total cost of ownership involved fails to reflect
value.
The bottom line is that rich user experience, reliable community-
based services, and ease of use for writers and readers are the most important
factors involved. Writers and educators need the ability to connect with team
members involved with managing content, while delivering it to readers
easily and effectively. This includes the availability of quality multimedia
with a community-building environment to help reproduce what’s missing
from actually being educated along with other students or employees in the
same room.
8

9. by Kevin Davison, TPW 600, Spring 2009
Resources
ATutor. ATutor Learning Content Management System: Information. 01 04 2009. 01 04 2009
<http://www.atutor.ca>.
Claroline Consortium. Home. 01 04 2009. 01 04 2009 <http://claroline.net/>.
Drupal. About Drupal. 28 02 2008. 01 04 2009 <http://drupal.org/about>.
—. Drupal in Education. 01 04 2009. 01 04 2009 <http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-education>.
Fitzgerald, Bill. Drupal for Education and E-learning. Birmingham: PACKT Publishing, 2008.
Hart, Jane. Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day. 22 04 2007. 01 04 2009
<http://janeknight.typepad.com/pick/2007/04/drupaled.html>.
Moodle. About Us. 01 04 2009. 01 04 2009 <http://moodle.org/about/>.
Open Source Initiative. Open Source Initiative. 7 July 2006. 10 April 2009
<www.opensource.org>.
Powers, Stephen. Web Content Management And Open Source. Forrester Research, Inc.
Cambridge, 19 06 2008.
Starbuck, Jon. AEES and Jon Starbuck Kevin Davison. San Francisco, 09 03 2009.
Urevick-Ackelsbert, Alex and Jody Hamilton. "Slides from our presentation at the Higher
Education Web Symposium." 17 07 2008. zivtech. 01 04 2009
<http://www.zivtech.com/blog/slides-our-presentation-higher-education-web-
symposium>.
9