Customer Reviews

Drupal for Education and E-Learning

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Drupal for Education and E-Learning

Another great book in the drupal revolution! This book is unique in that it is really a "cookbook" for a teacher (of any kind) to setup a new drupal site to use to enhance their classes.

The target audience is new or intermediate drupal users. The examples go through creating a very usable class oriented website, but the skills illustrated in the book would really work for any website design.

I enjoyed reading one of the first tips in the introduction.. "take notes," it sounds like a teacher but it is a great way for a new system admin to document the choices they made setting up their system. It makes it much easier to go back to change something down the road.

There is just about no programming talk in Drupal for Education - so don't be scared - this book will show you how to set up a very useful drupal website as a "site admin." You will be using the administration interface (and copying files) the whole way. The last chapter goes into some of the more technical duties of running adrupal website like backups and "cron" jobs.

The examples in the book - which are all drupal version 6 - go through how to use CCK and Views the main "drupal extensions" that allow an admin to really customize their website. The authors then start adding cool stuff like audio, pictures and video functionality.

Forums, tagging, user accounts and permissions and managing multiple classes on the same website are also well covered. So the secret to this book is that it is a great "learn by example" book for really anyone that wants to setup a pretty complex website. If you go through the examples in this book you will have the skills to create many other "vertical market" type websites.

Thanks for another great book in the Packt series of drupal books.

I bought this group because I was looking for help setting up Organic Groups. I got more than I bargained for. It covers a number of topics in a task-based way, much like the Lullabot 'Using Drupal' book. Thankfully, the two books don't cover the same topics. I was hoping for a much more complex look at Taxonomy strategies for college sites, but that is not what this book is about. It was still worth the money.

This is a mixed review for Bill Fitzgerald's Drupal for Education and E-Learning.

It's a great book that covers the methods for adding blogs, forums, podcasts, and videos to a learning environment using Drupal as a platform. Those who have already decided that Drupal is a good choice for education will get good instruction - those on the edge might be persuaded to choose Drupal for their programs. Drupal offers a lot features out of the box, and even more with contributed modules, and the lessons in this book cover them squarely.

The author makes each lesson concise and digestible and has a well developed arc and learning curve throughout the book. Teaching Drupal in building blocks is key. The technical examples are all spot on and really show off the capacity and flexibility of Drupal. I am confident that readers will grasp the author's tutorials and be in a great place to roll with it as their learning continues. I can also appreciate the last chapter which lays out options for readers to learn more with free resources that already exist.

However, the one shortcoming of this book is that the author provides little context or theory for using Drupal in the classroom. The author has excellent tutorials for creating blogs for teachers and students but hardly addresses the merits of blogs in the classroom. I was hoping for convincing arguments on why blogs, forums, podcasts and videos are good for learners and how Drupal can cater specifically to the education community.

E-learning is a massive field and that broader topic was slightly out of scope for the purposes of this book. But it would have been nice to include more visualization exercises that would help teachers incorporate Drupal into real classroom curriculum and help highlight the benefits of doing so. I'm afraid that educators and school administrators seeking such advice may come away from this book a bit disappointed.

In the end, however, if you are seeking a technical manual for setting up education tools with Drupal then this makes for a great companion.

This book lacks substance. The author covers a lot of set up tasks which can be picked up easily on your own or reading David Mercer's book on Drupal websites. There is very little programming if that's what you are looking for. I think the some of the content in this book is better if its combined with the Mercer's book, but really you can pick up most of these things on your own by trolling the internet for google answers. One of the things I did notice about this book was that though it tries to focus on E-Learning, it doesnt really build up any substance with how Drupal can be made to match up with commercial E-Learning platforms like Samba etc. It also does not cover much of Moodle integration with Drupal and how which seemed odd to me.

This book was recommended because of it's section on Organic Groups. I've been working with Drupal for over a year. And over that year I've spent a great deal of time piecing together answers from the web on how to do and setup certain functionality. But in less than 3 hours, I had a site up and running using Organic Groups. I'll add that setting up Organic Groups is not the most intuitive process. This chapter alone saved me countless hours of searching and was worth the price.

Bill's writing is very precise yet easy to follow. There is a nice flow to how the information is presented. He's very good at going through a process, step by step, then concisely explaining why something is set up in that manner.

I should add that though the title indicates a focus on education and elearning, there is valuable info that relates well to many other types of sites.

This book provides a great starting point for educators to learn how to set up a Drupal site for conducting a class.