Book review: Drupal for Education and E-Learning by Bill Fitzgerald
I was really excited when I received this book 'Drupal for Education and E-Learning' from Packt Publishing because I was about to embark on a re-design of a university website and from the given title of the book, it seems to fit what I wanted to know.
After reading through several chapters of this book, I quickly realise that the book is actually dealing mostly with building a community or social network site. This was a little disappointing since I have already own the book 'Drupal 6 Social Networking' so why would I want yet another book on this subject matter when the other one dealt with it so well. But as you delve further, you begin to appreciate that it is actually aim towards schools and universities just like the title of this book. Everything laid out in most chapters tackles adding features intended to be used by students and teachers in a classroom environment such as ways to harness online communications, tracking student progress, setting up different groups for classes, utilising online media for training purposes and multi-blogging.
The content of the book is laid out in an easy to follow steps with images to follow the step-by-step instructions. Everything is very well written and explained. It is definitely aimed at beginners wanting to create a community site with education establishment in mind. Even moderate users may also find it useful with the kind of features it teaches the reader to build.
What’s more, it doesn’t only deal with building the site but takes the reader from a building from scratch to a fully fledge website to maintaining the site once it is in production.
I highly recommend this book to anyone involved in ICT for schools or universities to purchase this book and assess the possibility of using Drupal as you will not be disappointed but rather, the joy of how easy it is to create a community site aim solely to be something students will find very useful. Even if you don’t plan on using this book to learn how to create a website for schools, there is always something useful to learn in understanding Drupal better.
My only small disappointment about this book was that it never to cover a chapter on distance (remote) e-learning for students which I find a little odd since we do have the technology and I believe there’s enough modules out side to sue without needing any custom work. Perhaps, it’s a bigger topic than I had imagined it to be. Either way, I’m glad to own this book, as it has been a good reference material.
You can get South University info about drupal classes and other training programs online.