Live elearning

Well, after making myself dizzy with learning how to customise the arrangement of information on Drupal to support a new group area, I think I’ve got it!

Here was the whiteboard assisted plan. If you go to the live page, you will see it has changed a bit. One aspect I hadn’t appreciated before was the functionality that groups brought to the party – anything attached to a group magically appears in the feed. Making separate areas for blog posts, pages and discussion forums not necessary. It may still be useful to consider highlighting the discussion posts.

We have 6 Elearning Innovation Projects at our institute this year and now each project has a project area (group in Drupal speak) within which they can have their own forum discussions, blog posts, pages of information.

All groups feed into one master “Elearning Innovations” Page at http://elearningcentral.polytechnic.tas.edu.au/node/171

This info can either be direct in the site or brought in from outside – see example at http://elearningcentral.polytechnic.tas.edu.au/node/169 where we brought in the feed from the Micro Business team’s edublogs blog and mix it up with content from the site.

I’ve used views to create blocks of info that either appear on the sidebars or in the content of the page.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been reviewing the content of our general elearning support pages (home: http://elearningcentral.polytechnic.tas.edu.au/ ) and making notes of what has to be done.

Still on the to-do list:

- re-jig the Elearning Processes area – this is the area needing the most content work.

- look at displays of information pulled in from elsewhere. Now I understand how the news aggregator and external feeds and views and blocks work together I think I can get what I want.

- Kick off forums for our Resource Development Advisor Community of Practice

- Have a nap.

Let me know what else should go on the to-do list…

Update: Just snaffled http://tinyurl.com/ei2009 for our shared project area.