An interesting little bit of research ahead of me. With yet another dead Sharepoint installation (no I don't know what I do to it either!) I've started to explore other options for our Learning Platform. With the time ticking on this one the research is going to have to be pretty quick and something up and running fairly fast. The other day I hit upon the idea of using Drupal and I'm currently in the process of asking the question "why not?". It has many points going in its favour. Some of these being, I understand it (always a bonus), I'm familiar with it (I don't like change) and it's PHP based (three ticks then). So can it do it?

By 2010 the government has stipulated that we have to give parents access to the assessment and attendance data of their kids. This is the big deadline at the moment. We can do this through the learning platform the council has in place for all schools in the area, but our license for this runs out next year and it ain't cheap. It also isn't very flexible and won't let us easily do the other stuff we want to do (the general consensuss is that it's rubbish but we won't go into that one, there is mucho politics surrounding the whole thing). Also by 2010 we will start offering the Business doda diploma thingy which relys heavily on the use of a learning environment. This basically means we need a way for teachers to hold "virtual" classes with homework/classwork distribution, shared document storage, wiki's, blogs etc.

All of our student data is held in our MIS but we can get it out in the form of XML files (I haven't seen the state of these yet) so I would just need to find a way to link parents to students (information which is held in the AD) and then present the data to parents when they log onto the platform.

The biggest hurdle I can see at the moment is getting users into the system (LDAP integration is possible I see from the module list) and linking them (students to their class teachers, parents to their kids). Also this needs to be extremely secure (major data protection issues going on here). My boss wants single sign-on when the kids are in school (appears to be possible) and also the ability for kids to access their home directories (no idea, gut says not possible, but I don't think this would be easy with Sharepoint either?). I then need to figure out a way to set up classes (organic groups?), link them to the teacher and students in a class and allow the teacher to create blogs, wikis, forums etc (that bit doesn't sound too hard once the initial hurdles are over). Students will also need to be able to format their own space (another government requirement), I'm thinking they can move blocks around, change their theme, have their own document store and blog etc, requirement met.

I have big thoughts, wonder if they're possible? (that SCORM module caught my eye too...)

(and there's always moodle....)