What's next for Plone in Education?

Evangelism

We fretted quite a bit over the challenges of bringing wider adoption to universities. This is related to ticket 7817, "Create an organizational structure for working groups... for use in specific industry segments..." generated during the Plone Strategic Planning Summit. It's also related to ticket 7820, "Create a plan to help local user groups market Plone and Python to local university students". General outcomes of Ploneability and the Plone Symposium East were straightforward: create compelling stories and use cases, develop a growing body of education-centric components and applications, ease the pain of integration, and nurture an active support community. All these will drive adoption to higher levels. Still lingering are issues surrounding notions of intellectual property, that is, the critical need for institutions to drop their byzantine legal processes in favor of agreements that support collaboration.

Killer apps

Calendar

There was broad agreement that a feature-rich calendar is the next killer app for educational institutions. Incredibly, calendars at large institutions are an image of their IT organizations: fragmented, siloed, and mute (and dare I say obsolete?!?). Penn State has a very ambitious project for a student group calendaring system. The Boston Plone Calendaring Sprint made major progress toward that goal.  

Assessment and accreditation

WebLion partner College of Education has been working on an assessment tool that will be used for accredidation purposes. Academic administrators are losing sleep over escalating demands from accredidation organizations and professional societies to provide organized collections of student-generated work to demonstrate quality of education. The Assessment Management System, under development by Joe Bigler (College of Education), and WebLion developers Eric Steele and Erik Rose, is delivering on the College's requirements for document management for accredidation. The interest it is creating among academic units is awesome.

Repositories

Also at Penn State, there is growing interest in the use of Plone as a front end for digital repositories; for curating collections of learning objects and media, and for use by libraries. Just the thing for the growing research infrastructure.

Learning objects

There was also interest in continued development of learning object editing and management systems, and open courseware delivery - Rhaptos and eduCommons being the current state of the art.

Integration tools

Downloads for CSSManager and GloWorm are impressive, reviews are positive, and development continues. Eric Steele will continue his reporting on GloWorm. Maybe Rob Porter will find time to write after his honeymoon ;-)