Drupal has quite a momentum going and using Drupal in the educational sector is also a hot topic these days. Quite a number of books are published e.g. Using Drupal in Education and the Drupal group Drupal in Education is more active than ever. Some other interesting ideas on this topic can also be found in the article OER’s: Publishing is the Easy Part; Now, Let’s Make Them More Usable.

Although “Drupal in Education” seems to be an interesting topic, more interesting to me right now is how to do good Drupal education meaning, how to teach/learn Drupal. As we are teaching Drupal at MEST, let me give you some ideas on how we are approaching this task.

We have planned 3 weeks in which we want to give a overview of Drupal’s major functionalities and and let our trainee’s get first hands on experiences with Drupal as a CMS. We do not include Drupal development in this 3 weeks, so we will not develop any custom modules, as it is a more advanced topic and not a necessary to get a good idea of what Drupal is and what you can do with it.

We have split the different areas of Drupal knowledge on the 3 weeks like this:

1. Introduction / Installation
   • What is a CMS? What is drupal?
   • Examples of drupal websites
   • Installation session: How to setup drupal locally
   • Overview of the functionalities of the administration interface
2. Important Modules
   • Installing Modules
   • Using CCK and Views
3. Theming
   • Function overwriting
   • Contemplate
   • CCK Theming (content types, fields)
   • Creating your own theme

We have a lot of small tasks planned in which the EITs (Trainees, Entrepreneurs in Training) get a lot of exposure to the different parts of Drupal. Hopefully they will get excited about using Drupal and about the possibilities they have with using an open source CMS.

I will follow up with more information on what we have learned from teaching Drupal once we have finished this 3 weeks.

Link List
Using Drupal in Education
Drupal in Education
OER’s: Publishing is the Easy Part; Now, Let’s Make Them More Usable
MEST