Drupal and Learning Management

In this post I'm aiming to summarise the state of play of Drupal and Learning Management. At Sereno, we've either developed our own LMS funcionality from scratch, like advanced quizzing or content sharing tools, or relied on packages like Moodle to do the heavy lifting for us. So I'm interested in both 'just-enough' LMS functionality - especially where this can be seamlessly integrated to an existing Drupal sites, and also the potential of finding a more fully-fledged LMS toolset that's entirely built on Drupal so we no longer face the challenge of Moodle integration.

For a while Eduglu seemed like a front runner in the Drupal LMS domain. This is a fully-fledged LMS very much in the Moodle tradition. It ships with a range of features like groups, discussions, quizzes, notebooks and highly structured ways to organise and distribute content. Eduglu's creator Kyle Matthews left the project last year and I'm not sure if it currently has a road map but some may find specific modules - for example Eduglu's own version of the Drupal generic Quiz module - worth taking on and using. That said, there are a couple of new kids on the block that are also well worth considering. Elms has been developed at Penn State. Currently in Alpha 5, this certainly still has the feel of an alpha but is shaping up nicely. Again, all the features you'd expect are there - structured course creation and versioning, group access control - along with additional features, such as exports, help desk, and image sharing.

Default theming is a weakness but this shouldn't be a problem to anyone familiar with Drupal as you'd probably want to theme this yourself anyway. I was also interested to check out some learning modules from Int3C that work with Open Atrium (by the way, we really like Open Atrium a lot here at Sereno!). The ability to add just about any quiz question type you can think of, alongside features like polls is a great way of extending Open Atrium if you are already enjoying its benefits as an Intranet or community tool but also need some competency or assessment testing.

Finally, I just want to mention Open Academy from the highly talented people at Chapter 3. This is just coming out for beta testers and I'm not sure what the licensing is going to be but I'm really looking forward to getting my first peek. So where does this leave Drupal and the LMS? If you're looking to extend your existing Drupal site to include learning, training or assessment, there are plenty of options for you. There's no obvious Moodle-alike but in any case a fully-fledged Drupal LMS would almost inevitably be a lot more social-learning oriented and look quite different. As Drupal stands today, itl already contains great community tools and many more features you'd expect to see as part of a social learning mix. Plus Drupal's modular approach means you can add in features like quizzing fairly easily. The goal here, I think, is to better integrate learning and development within your organisation rather than having a separate space on your site where people go to learn. Thinking about learning in Drupal as 'just another module' might help you to realise this goal.