Open Scholar Takes Open Source CMS to School

by Lisa Hoover - Aug. 03, 2010Comments (5)

We write a lot on OStatic about the importance of using open source textbooks, tools and software in educational institutions. Open Scholar is a great tool for helping schools and colleges create collaborative academic Web sites without spending a dime on software.

Drupal-based Open Scholar is a free, open source content management system designed to easily build Web sites for classrooms, academic projects, individual professors, or entire universities. It installs easily and can host an unlimited number of sites on a single installation. Open Scholar supports customizable domains so schools can have relevant URLs and requires no programming knowledge to have a site up and running in minutes.

The software is packed with useful features like social collaboration tools, content aggregation, and themes. It comes pre-configured with Google Analytics, and a batch of plugins let administrators add blogging, announcements, image galleries and more to the site.

At least one big name school is using Open Scholar to reach out to its community. Harvard University created two different sites -- one for its professors' personal Web pages, and another for academic projects.

Previous: Spicebird a Great De...Next: Eureka Streams Bring... Browse Blog

by Alex Lindahl on Aug. 03, 2010

Acquia is also partnered with Harvard to provide fully managed services for OpenScholar. Think OpenScholar SaaS.

We are receiving significant interest from universities and have had to accelerate our plans.

We will also be doing a demo in the coming weeks for those that are interested.

Alex Lindahl

Acquia, Inc.

alex [at] acquia [dot] com

0 Votes

by Stan Gomez on Aug. 04, 2010

Guys (and @alex) - do we need ANOTHER e-learning application? What is wrong with Moodle, or even the basic install of Drupal? Will this not simply confuse the market?

0 Votes

by redndahead on Aug. 04, 2010

@stan This is not a learning platform. This is a way for faculty/graduate students to create websites dedicated to them and what they do. Their resume/cv, research, publications, etc.

0 Votes

by Sam Dean on Aug. 04, 2010

@Alex --thanks for the update from Acquia.

Sam

0 Votes

by osiname on Jan. 19, 2011

Can this be used to replace Moodle as a VLE? Moodle is all good and that but id be far more confident using a Drupal based VLE.

(If I can convince IT!!)

Thanks.

0 Votes