Drupal for Education Crushes WebCT

This may be the most significant endorsement of Drupal I've ever seen. Charlie Lowe just asked his Technical writing class to give an end of course evaluation comparing Drupal and WebCT. For those of you with sex lives, WebCT is a proprietary CMS for education that costs roughly $5000.00 a year, not including support fees. Drupal on the other hand is a completely free, and open source CMS that can be used for everything from education to politics to pornography. () Asked his students to "Reflect on your experience using Drupal (the software running the course website) in comparison to your previous experiences using WebCT in your classes".

Over 90 percent of students perferred drupal to WebCT. While the overwhelming support for drupal over WebCT is suprising in itself; its particularly suprising in light of the fact that educators have had so little time to adapt drupal to their needs. No doubt, many educators will take note of this. In addition, I have no doubt the academic community will welcome a chance to work in collaboration to develop their own open-source learning tools. Provided that University administrators (a.k.a. "idiots") don't interfere with instructors that want to move to open source, I think we'll see an expontential rate of adoption of drupal for education. I'm personally very excited to see how it evolves over the next few years. I dream of an open and free infastructure dedicated to providing everyone with the same knowledge, and opprotunities for self-education that can be found in universities (but that's for a whole nuther' blog post). This platform might provide a good first step for that.