Open Scholar Review

Open Scholar has been developed by Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University. This impressive piece of Drupal-based software provides a rich feature set for institutions wishing to drive collaboration among educators. While this is primarily intended for academics, the ability to maintain multiple scholar profiles and sites means that you can quickly build interconnections between autonomous users - you don't need to think of them as 'academics' only.

Site members can easily connect with each other and some of the features (like activity rivers) did in fact remind me a little bit of the pre v1.0 version of Elgg, which started life primarily as a social learning network. The feature set is rich and well thought-out - blogs, user profiles, calendaring, events, publications and profiles which might be used to power e-portfolios if that was something you wanted. Non technical users can control the layout of columns and blocks in their site through a simple drag and drop interface, or select custom themes and logos. The power of the Drupal CMS is nicely packaged into a safe and contained administrative interface.

I want to mention a couple of other important things about this piece of software: The power of distributions.

This is another fully-fledged distribution (web application in a box) of Drupal. Either download and install, or go online and just set yourself up a site with Acquia - with the latter option no technical knowledge is required. This sidesteps the steep learning curve generally associated with otherwise raw Drupal set ups. Customisable. As it's Drupal (and open source of course), you can think about ways of incorporating or extending this to meet your needs. If you're an academic or academic institution, this will do a great job for you out of the box. But if you're looking to build collaborative learning communities in other environments, Open Scholar may well provide you with the platform you need. And as I say, being Drupal you can easily change the look, add in extra modules or integrate with other Drupal (or even non Drupal) services.

Open Scholar will let you do that with customised sub-domains or whatever you need. My take is that it's easy to underestimate the reach of Open Scholar. At first glance it can look like a piece of academic niche publishing software - and if it just did that one job really well, I'd still be applauding. But this is a great Drupal-based social collaboration product that could help run many types of scalable learning communities.