With 2021 underway, K-12 and higher education institutions have a new challenge on their hands – proper remote learning management. With millions of students across the globe still attending classes and exams from home, schools need to find efficient ways to compensate for it.
Based on published data, 7% of the top 10,000 websites use Drupal CMS, with around 46,350 Drupal modules available for free download as functionality extensions. Drupal CMS can provide educational instructions with a good platform to work with when it comes to student management due to its list of features.
According to Drupal Groups, some of the most prolific schools, such as Oxford University, MIT, Stanford University, and UCLA, all rely on Drupal CMS already. The CMS can provide your school with a combination of time-efficient, cost-effective, and user-friendly features meant to make the students’ learning easier and more engaging. Let’s take a closer look at what Drupal can do for your school or university and how you can benefit from relying on it.
Benefits of Drupal for educational websites
Scalability & Affordability
As we’ve mentioned briefly, Drupal CMS is highly flexible in regards to the modules you can integrate into it. Given the open-source nature of these modules, the Drupal community continually provides new extensions for public use.
These modules often come free of charge and can be used to enhance your students’ experience. You can easily scale your school’s platform up or down depending on how complex the learning, testing, and grading operations are.
Extensive Multiplatform Support
Students are used to relying on their smartphones and tablets on a daily basis – why not meet them halfway? Drupal CMS is designed with native multiplatform support in mind, meaning that it can be used properly via a plethora of screen sizes and platforms.
This is a great time and cost-saving factor, which should be taken into consideration by educational institutions considering Drupal CMS as their go-to option. Teachers can send learning materials, test students, or even set up an autoresponder for their student group to create an accessible and dynamic experience.
User-Friendly Content Management
Once your CMS is set up, you want to make sure that your teachers are able to easily manage their courses and content autonomously. This is what makes Drupal a great choice for schools and universities since teachers can be educated on how to use it quite quickly.
Editing modules such as WYSIWYG can help teachers insert and edit study materials for student groups efficiently and without additional tools required to do so. Given its multiplatform support, teachers can also upload and manage their content through various devices and engage the students whenever it is convenient for them.
International Localization Opportunities
Depending on the type of educational institution, international language support may be necessary for effective teaching. This is also where Drupal CMS shines, as it offers native multilingual support for schools to build their platforms with.
This is extremely useful given the current social distancing and travel restriction norms, which forbid many students from visiting their campuses.
Flexible Integration of Third-Party Tools & Platforms
Educational institutions which dabble into IT, design, and other creative professions will often require the use of additional platforms and tools during their teaching process. Additionally, some schools might want to use Drupal CMS to manage more than just learning and opt to micromanage different aspects of school management instead.
Drupal provides extensive support for a variety of additional platforms which can seamlessly become a part of your CMS stack going forward. Platforms such as Mail Chimp can thus be integrated into your CMS to allow for a plethora of new student management possibilities.
Inherent Data Security Features
Protecting your students’ and teachers’ personal information is crucial for the continued success of any educational institution. Drupal is far less prone to hacking and malware intrusions than its contemporaries due to its open-source development.
New fixes and security patches are delivered constantly, making data security a non-issue for those that rely on Drupal CMS. As such, it is one of the very few free CMS platforms with near-enterprise level security, making it ideal for educational institutions with tight budgets.
Dedicated Educational Institutions Support
As we’ve mentioned, Drupal is an open-source CMS solution available to anyone willing to learn how to use it. This has given rise to groups which specialize in different subsections and applications of Drupal CMS. One such group is dedicated to educational institutions with an aim to give teachers insight into how to use Drupal effectively.
Teachers and developers in charge of maintaining educational Drupal CMS can use these and other groups to inquire about how to use the platform effectively. If you are inclined, you can also pitch in with your own ideas, modules, and even conferences or discussions about Drupal CMS in education. This makes the CMS very community-based and allows for a much more personalized and user-friendly usage experience compared to others on the market.
Multi Website Management Features
Finally, depending on the scale of your educational institution and whether you belong to a larger university network, you may want to consider using Drupal. Drupal CMS offers extensive multi-domain management features through its dedicated modules, allowing you to work with multiple websites from a single access point.
You can create dedicated websites for your public school presentation, student testing, student learning, etc. Creating sister domains and websites under Drupal is convenient and simple to do, allowing different departments, courses, and student groups to have their own sites. This can declutter your CMS and allow for much-needed breathing room between teachers and their study modules, so make sure to take it into consideration.
The Value of Using Drupal
Drupal is a highly flexible and feature-rich CMS with a wide range of modules and third-party support for your school’s convenience. It is already in active use by some of the most prolific academic institutions out there, which illustrates its value in education. Take a closer look at how Drupal can help you manage your students more easily as we go into 2021. You will quickly discover the depth of this unique CMS and the wonders of the many modules developed by a passionate community of like-minded developers.
About the author: Kristin Savage is a professional writer, editor, and business development advisor at https://subjecto.com/flashcards/ education website. She is a well-versed content creator and writer, delving into topics of digital marketing, online learning, and business development, among others. Kristin also likes to write academic papers and essays for students in need. She is a bookworm and jogger in her spare time.
