New release of Eduglu

I'm pleased to announce the second release of Eduglu! Eduglu is a Drupal distribution designed to support social learning at institutions of higher learning. It's available for download now at http://eduglu.com/download-eduglu. Since the first release, We've squashed dozens of major and minor bugs and made the significant jump to the Spaces 3 and Context 3.

Eduglu helps learners connect with one another and form learning communities. Eduglu provides online spaces for groups to learn together.

Our social learning platform ships with a number of powerful social learning applications including discussion boards with full email integration (like Google Groups), polls, and wikis.

I recorded a quick screencast demoing an initial setup of Eduglu. Check it out to get a flavor for what Eduglu can do.

Hosted Eduglu coming

I'm also rather excited to announce that a fully supported hosted version of Eduglu is coming. Schools and other organizations will soon be able to easily sign-up for hosted Eduglu to meet the social learning needs of their organization. Head over to eduglu.com and leave your email address to hear when we open up for business and to provide early feedback.

This will be our initial stab at creating a sustainable business model for our Drupal educational distribution. There's been a lot of discussion lately in the Drupal community about finding business models that can help create sustainable Drupal Distributions. I'm not sure hosted Eduglu is the right business model for that task but since a startup is "an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model", we'll give this business model a try for awhile as we look for ways to freshen the stagnant world of educational technology.

What's coming next for Eduglu?

Eduglu works well with 500-1000 members. But we want it to work for much much larger organizations. Organizations the size of my alma mater Brigham Young University that has 30,000 students and 250,000+ alumni. To make Eduglu work on that scale, we'll be adding features such as group suggesting, robust search and filtering, activity streams, and twitter-style following.

Also we're working on a number of social learning applications. Right now Eduglu ships with four social learning applications. A discussion/mailing list, wiki, and polling.

The next two major applications we'd like to ship are a blogging application that let's learners blog on various things they are learning and comment on other's blogs. If the learner has an existing blog, they'll be able to connect it to their Eduglu blog so new posts there are automatically imported.

The second application is a Group RSS Reader that lets a group of learners subscribe to content via RSS and provides various means for rating, sorting, sharing, and discussing content brought into the group.

Both are powerful learning tools that help students more easily share what they are learning and track and discuss the best ideas that are being written about on the Internet and we're excited to get them out into the wild.