Instructor Bernie Dodge bdodge@mail.sdsu.edu

Content Management Systems for Education and Training

A CMS organizes information and makes it easy for registered participants to contribute to it. It can include discussion forums, calendars, resource lists, media repositories and more. Participants in this course will design and create their own CMS for use within a school, course, training effort, or informal learning environment. Using the open source Drupal platform, you'll develop a working website ready for public use. (Note: participants must have access to a web host with PHP and MySQL. Pointers to low-cost options will be provided.
Meets 3/10 & 3/24     Schedule # 10883.

Overview

This course is designed to be practical, current, interesting, empowering and thought-provoking. It is built around active learning and collaborative thinking. When we're done, you'll have created a working content management system designed to support a learning community of your choice.

Audience

This course is targeted at teachers at the K-12 and college levels as well as others involved in the training of adults. Some prior experience with web development is assumed.

Learning Outcomes

In this course you will learn how to

• identify critical elements needed in an online environment to support a learning community
• create a design document outlining a CMS application to meet a specific need
• install, modify and manage an LCMS and a CMS

Resources

A growing list of course-related links is available and will be maintained after the course is over.

Course Outline

Session 1: March 10, 2007

• Course and participant introductions
• Why Use a CMS? Demo
• Drupal & CMS Overview by John Kenyon
• Explore examples and generate a list of CMS elements. Here's what we found
• Analyze your situation in terms of needs, participants, motivation, competition and post a summary

LUNCH - 4.0 Deli (An EDTEC 700 tradition)

• Learning Management Systems
• Hands on with our own Moodle
• Hands on with Drupal Joomla aTutor Claroline
• Peer review of draft proposal

Weeks-In-Between

• Think about a domain name
• Get yourself an account on SiteGround
• Install Drupal
• Read the Drupal tutorials
• View the Drupal screencasts
• Identify Modules you might need
• Elaborate on your proposal draft
• Round up images, documents, resource lists and whatever else you'll need to seed your site
• Read the eLearning Guild tips documents on selection, implementation and management

Session 2: March 24, 2007

• Hands-on site setup and build-out
• Peer review of sites