Drupal in Education & Training

I am really looking forward to attending the upcoming Drupal & Education Camp at Oxford  next month. Drupal has a long-standing relationship with the education sector, especially in the US where it powers about 26% of all .edu sites. I've written before about Drupal LMS initiatives and similar Drupal distributions targeted specifically at schools and universities. However, despite the excellent tools out there Drupal certainly does not have a Learning Management System (LMS) offering to rival, say, Moodle, and there's been a lot of discussion recently about what a fully-fledged Drupal LMS might look like.
For my money, attempts to recreate Moodle are misguided. Why? To begin with we already have Moodle! It's possible to create single sign-on and integrate Moodle with Drupal. But more fundamentally, I believe we should be asking questions about the relevance of the large-scale LMS these days. Do we really need enormous command and control centres to help people learn? Shouldn't we be embracing light-weight applications and freeing learners to use the tools and approaches that suit them best? While we still train and teach to tests (too often to the detriment of learning!), I certainly don't see an end for the need for sophisticated quizzing and reporting in certain circumstances. Fortunately, Drupal already does that very well with the Quiz module. SCORM - that most agonizing of standards - is still all-pervasive due to the sheer volume of learning programmes built to more or less work with its standards. I haven't been able to find a robust SCORM module for Drupal 7 yet and this will need to be addressed. (For those interested, there's a third party application that looks interesting at SCORM Cloud.) But rather than emulate the LMS, I see a more valuable route for Drupal in the deep integration of learning content and experiences into its existing modules and architecture.
Learning is not something 'separate' from what we do. It is not - contrary to much received wisdom - a distinct activity that always requires a separate learning space. We certainly learn socially and we learn informally too. This is true in many environments where learning while doing, sharing best practice with your colleagues and incorporating learning as part of your daily workflow makes the most sense - indeed, this is generally how most of us develop our skills and learn day-to-day. Drupal can build brilliantly a wide range of applications and services to drive Intranets & Extranets. As such, the focus should be on leveraging learning into the features Drupal already provides rather than in creating a separate and fully-featured LMS system. A localised, modular approach that favours close integration with existing Drupal architecture and modules is surely the way forward.