Kyle Mathews :: Dreams With In

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.

Two questions from moderator:

* What will the next generation of learning tools look like?
* What do Universities need to do to prepare?

Marko Turpeinen from Helsinki Institute for Information Technology demoing Sizzle.

DrChuck warning that what works for small sizes don't scale. Too much friction to using these tech tools. There should be a one-click install.

He envisions large diverse ecosystem of learning applications where teachers, grad students, small startups build learning tools that all interoperate with one another. Like the app store -- teachers can find apps and click to add them depending on their need.

For all this talk about next generation learning -- very very few people are doing anything similar. Huge inertia. Have to build pathways into future. Lower friction to using new tools. Dr. Chuck looking at adding escape hatches into major LMSs.

I've been sitting on this blog post for months now trying to crystallize my thoughts but having failed to do so I've decided that I'm perhaps not yet mature or experienced enough to understand my motivations. So I'll suffice with a few thoughts and a video and perhaps return to this subject at some point in the future.

The following video is from Bronco Mendenhall, the football coach at BYU, my alma mater. If you'll excuse that it's a commercial for BYU, I think you'll find it quite good. Bronco's line at the end comes pretty close to expressing why I want to be an excellent person and to do excellent work -- "Never forget that so much depends on what you do today."

For whatever reason, I've been blessed to a high degree with good parents, good health, intelligence, excellent education, and many more advantages. But I can take little credit for these. To quote BYU's President Samuelson, "We must never forget that we figuratively eat fruit grown on trees we did not plant, drink from wells we did not dig, learn and live in buildings we did not build, and are warmed by fires for which we did not provide fuel (see Deuteronomy 6:10–12)."

Most of the happiness and prosperity I enjoy are the results of good decisions and teachings of my parents and the generally good and wise decisions of world leaders which have led to the current general peace and prosperity most parts of the world enjoys (including my part of the world in the United States).

Being the recipient of so many advantages, I feel a great obligation to pay forward all that has been given to me. As my current happiness and prosperity is dependent on the decisions and work of previous generations, so too the happiness and prosperity of the current and yet unborn generations depends, to some degree, on the decisions and work I do, today.

If we desire, each of us can do a great deal of good in our time here on earth. And the first step toward that goal is a commitment to excellence.

I've been working on a social learning site based on Drupal for the past two years as a student at Brigham Young University and am now working towards readying it for its maiden release into the world as a full-fledged Drupal install profile.

My goal with Eduglu is to:
a) Provide a superb out-of-the-box social learning engine to help departments, clubs, classrooms, and other campus groups communicate, collaborate, and learn with one another.
b) Support a social learning platform which individual universities and Drupal shops can integrate with existing tools and services and use to build custom tools supporting specific learning practices.

Or in simpler terms, Eduglu = robust social learning engine + pluggable educational tools.

For Drupalers, Eduglu is built on the same stack of modules as Open Atrium; Organic Groups, Spaces, Context, and Features.

I'm also working to start a company to provide commercial support and hosting for Eduglu.

But we're not there yet. My plan is to make the first beta release by Drupalcon where I'll be presenting more about Eduglu. But to be ready by then, I need alpha testers. If you're interested in becoming an alpha tester, please contact me. I'll be preparing an initial release over the next couple of weeks.

Also, if you do Drupal consulting in higher education, I'd love to work with you. Please contact me and let's discuss how we can work together.

Lastly, if you're an educator working in higher ed, I'd love to talk to you as well. Especially people working at online or virtual colleges and community colleges. If there's an educational tool you've dreamed of having -- or tried building and failed -- contact me and tell me about it and I might just build it for you.

And if you're not in one of the above three groups but know someone who is -- please connect me with those people.

I'll be doing a bit of travel in a couple of weeks. I'll be in Boston February 17th-20th, New York February 22-23 and Washington DC on the 24th-25th. If you're in one of those cities and want to meet and talk Drupal/higher education, let's get in touch!

Thanks all! It's going to be an exciting ride and I'm looking forward to it.