Drupal for Education and E-Learning

Bill Fitzgerald has written a comprehensive technical guide for the Drupal open source content management system with a focus on its use in formal education. Drupal for Education and E-Learning, by Packt Publishing, walks you through the setup of a Drupal installation, step by step. This is a how-to book, covering everything from themes to modules to backup and maintenance. The core of the book is on education-specific aspects, such as teacher blogs, forums, enrolling students and managing classes. It also covers the use of various media and there are many comments on considerations from a learning perspective.

Drupal is not specifically designed for education, as Moodle is, but Bill gives a good map on how it can be used. The Drupal developer and user community is also larger than Moodle’s and an important factor in choosing an open source system is the strength of the developer/user community. Also, Drupal can be used for other aspects of the institution, such as alumni relations or digital asset management

I would think that this book would be excellent for the system administrator at an institution, the project lead or senior instructional designer. Parts of it would be of interest to individual teachers. Since Drupal has no licensing fees, institutions can afford several copies of this book.