Drupal as an LMS Companion

This blog is for higher education online course designers and builders, whether they be professors, educational technologists or instructional designers.  It is dedicated to creating essential bridges between learning management systems and other online environments.  These bridges are essential to make participation, resource sharing, and community-building as meaningful and effective as it can be. 

I discuss some of the places to bridge an LMS to in other blog posts.  These include a Learning Content Management System (LCMS) where content is available after the course ends, and a Social Learning Environment (SLE) where students can make connections with each other, renew past connections, and build a network that includes non-students.

Drupal is a very powerful open source "web application development framework"  for creating these external environments, customized to the requirements of schools and content domains. Another handy feature is that Drupal's community has created "distributions"  - pre-made customizable websites designed to do various things that large eLearning communities and providers can benefit from.

• As an LMS, Drupal's ability to handle all content types and create searchable, filterable portals makes it possible for non-programmers to create an annotated archive of learning content.  Gappsfored.com is a Drupal site specifically designed as an LCMS to support an online course series for Google Apps for Education in one-to-one classes, whicih uses Google Classroom as an LMS.
  
  
• As a SLE, the Drupal Commons distribution can be downloaded for free and deployed in minutes, then customized and pre-seeded to support the communities and conversations appropriate to a given degree program or continuing education domain.

The Conference Presentation PDF attached below focuses on pairing Drupal and Moodle, but Drupal can work with any LMS.