When Higher Education Goes Digital
Creating Compelling Website, E-learning and Social
Experiences, Affordably
Staying Abreast of Changing Web
Technologies
IT:
• Maintaining existing infrastructure, delivering innovative
digital experiences and managing content
- Decentralized hosting
- Legacy servers
- Obsolete development tools
- Tight budgets
• Risk due to outdated infrastructure
• Rising student, faculty and staff
expectations
2
Staying Abreast of Changing Web
Technologies
Faculty, staff, students:
• Need engaging, interactive web, e-learning and social
environments
• Reliant on IT to develop and maintain content
• Must remain innovative to attract students and supporters
3
Solution = Drupal + Acquia
• Create compelling web sites, e-learning and social
experiences - affordably
• Deliver rich media content to web, social, and mobile
channels
• Reduce operating costs
• Reduce IT workload
• Reduce risk
• Increase educational results
• Support students, staff, and faculty
• Build connections with off-campus supporters and sponsors
4
Solution = Drupal + Acquia
• 71 out of the top 100 universities use Drupal
• Drupal in Education spans all 50 states and the globe
• MIT, Oxford and every Ivy League School, uses Drupal
• 26% of all Education sites worldwide use Drupal, double
the nearest competitor
5
Drupal
• Faculty and educational staff develop and maintain sites they want; IT
provides centralized hosting and support
• Application development environment for assembling EDU solutions oriented
around content and community
• Tailor content delivery to meet the objectives of informational campaigns
- Content flows seamlessly across web, social, and mobile channels, on demand
and as required
• Users begin with a rich set of content and community-enabled modules
• Worldwide Drupal community for sharing experiences and driving innovation
• Easy to retire legacy infrastructure and build next-generation solutions
• Readily integrate with other on-campus systems and applications
6
Acquia
• Expertly curated versions of Drupal for assembling educational applications,
managing multiple web sites from a single source across a campus, building
social sites, distributing mobile content, and deploying learning solutions
• Hosts Drupal environments for campus-wide deployments optimized for high
performance and designed to adapt to highly variable network traffic, such
as when students return to campus and are enrolling in classes
• Provides training, site planning and professional services essential for
campuses to build their Drupal expertise
- Technical expertise to help solve complex integration tasks, such as incorporating
very large legacy databases into a Drupal-powered site
- Supports campus developers with a hosted development environment, a range of
developer tools, and a community-driven knowledge base
• School only pays for the systems and network resources it consumes
7
What Does This Mean for Users?
• Users easily develop and maintain engaging educational, social and e-learning
sites
- Deliver online courseware – combining video and audio tracks with lesson plans,
lecture notes, and links to reading assignments and tests
- Blend published information with user-generated content
• Maintain autonomy, control/manage content, and easily launch own sites within
the context of the campus environment, eliminating reliance on IT assistance
• Raise awareness about academic, social, and scientific activities
• Forge deep connections with off-campus supporters and sponsors
• Cut costs
- No software licensing fees
- Only pay for IT services used
• Non-technical users can get out of the hardware and infrastructure support
business
8
What Does This Mean for IT?
• Modernize web infrastructure
• Efficiently support multiple educational activities and web
sites of faculty and staff
• Cut costs, risk and workload while increasing productivity
• Ensure consistent look and feel for university web sites
• Share design, best practices, code snippets, and
functional modules through the open source community
9
Modernizing Campus Web Infrastructure
• Drupal provides flexibility and extensibility
• Engaging sites and educational experiences
- Content- and community-centric
- Incorporate structured and unstructured data sources
- Blend published information with user-generated content
• Reduce time, effort spent on application development
- Users begin with rich set of modules
- Quickly assemble applications from building blocks
- Extend modules for additional functionality or develop new modules for new
functionality
• Global Drupal community for sharing experiences, driving innovation;
reach out to colleagues at other institutions for help
- 16,000 active developers and nearly 800,000 users
10
Modernizing Campus Web Infrastructure
• University of Colorado, Boulder
• Challenges:
-
Operating decentralized environment with
600+ servers
-
Producing static content with outdated tools
-
Storing information in discrete databases
-
No way to deliver web, mobile, social
experiences
• Results:
11
-
Centralized IT
-
Single, campus-wide CMS
-
Delivers engaging, current web experiences
and new educational activities
-
Consistent look and feel for campus sites
-
Information architecture for categorizing
content into well-recognized categories
-
Migrating legacy content into single
infrastructure
Multiple Faculty, Research, Student and
Administrative Sites
• Drupal enables numerous sites from common core
- Self-service options to quickly, easily create/maintain their own
customized sites
- Eliminates reliance on IT
• Reduce investments, staffing and costs; only pay for IT
resources used
• Acquia training and technical expertise, including
- Supporting existing single sign-on services
- Integrating Drupal with federated ID and authentication services
- Encapsulating legacy databases within Drupal site
12
Multiple Faculty, Research, Student and
Administrative Sites
• Bentley University
• Challenges:
-
Manual approach to publishing workflow
-
Difficult and expensive to retain developers
-
Static, inflexible functionality
-
Slow performance and lower content visibility
-
CMS product no longer supported
• Results:
13
-
Consolidate and centrally manage content; content
unique to respective areas and shared across
subdomains easily and dynamically
-
Reduced resource demands
-
Migration direct and reliable
-
Search and page load performance improved
-
Content created more easily and frequently
-
Information is more accessible
-
Cut costs
Create and Maintain Social Sites and
E-Learning Environments
• Drupal offers social networking and community-building
modules
• Users design sites by choosing from modules or
distributions of packaged modules
• Enables structured learning with rich media content
14
Create and Maintain Social Sites and
E-Learning Environments
• Penn State (ELMS)
• Challenges:
-
Extend web from passive online resource into
active, engaging learning environment
-
Support teaching across campus
• Results:
-
Drupal ELMS, blending rich media with text
-
Faculty manage course content and activities
-
Students collaborate; share projects
-
New capabilities added as requirements
change
•
15
Easily modify access controls to certain courses
to benefit global student community (Open
Educational Resources (OER))
Promote Web Experiences
• Proactively engage sponsors/funders
• Target content delivery to stakeholders
- Tailor messages for email campaigns
- Leverage social media
- Syndicate content to web, social and mobile sites supporters
visit
• Track results
• Manage relationships with key supporters
16
Next-Generation Digital Experiences
• Drupal: Flexible, open source platform enabling non-technical users to quickly and
easily create and maintain compelling sites, affordably
• Acquia:
- Enterprise-grade support, training, hosting, development ensuring success with Drupal
- Drupal Solutions engage student, staff, faculty across web and best serve
constituencies/stakeholders
• Acquia Drupal: fast, easy web publishing
• Drupal Commons: building/hosting collaborative web sites
• Enterprise Drupal Gardens: creating/managing large numbers of web sites
• OpenScholar: creating turnkey faculty sites (developed at Harvard)
• Open Academy: creating departmental sites (developed at Stanford and U California, Berkley)
• ELMS: online learning and assignments
• Acquia Managed Cloud: hosting high-traffic sites requiring enterprise-level support; customers
no longer maintain hardware, OS, etc.
17
Drupal in EDU:
•
•
•
•
Australian National University
Boston University
Brown University
California Institute of Technology
•
Carnegie Mellon University
•
Chinese University of Hong Kong
•
•
•
Columbia University
Cornell University
Dartmouth College
•
Duke University
•
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
•
•
•
École Normale Supérieure de Paris
École Polytechnique de Paris
Erasmus Universiteit
•
Harvard University
•
Heidelberg University
•
•
•
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Imperial College London
Johns Hopkins University
•
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
•
King’s College London
•
18
Kyoto University
•
Mass Institute of Technology
•
University of Edinburgh
•
McGill University
•
University of Glasgow
•
Monash University
•
University of Helsinki
•
Nanyang Technological University
•
University of Illinois
•
National Taiwan University
•
University of Melbourne
•
National University of Singapore
•
University of Michigan
•
New York University
•
University of Minnesota
•
Northwestern University
•
University of New South Wales
•
Penn State University
•
University of North Carolina
•
Princeton University
•
University of Oxford
•
Purdue University
•
University of Pennsylvania
•
Stanford University
•
University of Queensland
•
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
•
University of Sheffield
•
Tokyo Institute of Technology
•
University of Southampton
•
Trinity College Dublin
•
University of St. Andrews
•
Tsinghua University
•
University of Sydney
•
University of Alberta
•
University of Texas
•
University of Amsterdam
•
University of Toronto
•
University of British Columbia
•
University of Warwick
•
University of Alberta
•
University of Wisconsin
•
University of Amsterdam
•
University of Western Australia
•
University of British Columbia
•
University of Wisconsin
•
University of California, Berkeley, LA, San Diego
•
Uppsala University
•
University of Cambridge
•
Washington University in St. Louis
•
University of Chicago
•
Yale University