Alice Raynich

EdTech Digitalisation Expert

Alice possesses in-depth knowledge and industry-specific experience in detecting and enhancing companies' digital potential using cutting-edge best practices and trends. She has honed her expertise through numerous projects, helping clients worldwide meet market requirements and overcome challenges.

Drupal

6 min

Drupal for Higher Education Institutions: Why It's the Top Choice

Proper remote learning management is a major challenge for educational organizations. Considering that millions of students across the globe have to attend classes from the comfort of their homes, /*-->*/ higher education institutions require a strong digital presence to meet their needs. Drupal for higher education—is the main topic of today's article. In the following paragraphs, we'll discuss why higher education organizations rely on Drupal for their education efforts. Based on published data, 7% of the top 10,000 websites use Drupal, with around 46,350 Drupal modules available for free download as functionality extensions. Thanks to its valuable features, this CMS provides educational instructions with a good platform to work with when it comes to student management. According to Drupal Groups, some of the most prolific organizations, such as Oxford University, MIT, Stanford University, and UCLA, rely on Drupal in their education efforts. The CMS can provide your institution 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 using it. Benefits of Drupal for Educational Websites So what are the main benefits of Drupal for educational organizations? Let's discuss them below 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. That's one of the reasons why Drupal is a great CMS for higher education. Extensive Multiplatform Support Students are used to relying on their smartphones and tablets daily – why not meet them halfway? Drupal is designed with native multiplatform support in mind, meaning that it can be used properly across different screen sizes and platforms. This is a great time- and cost-saving factor, which should be taken into consideration by educational institutions considering Drupal 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 content management system is set up, you want to make sure that your teachers can easily manage their courses and content autonomously. This is what makes Drupal a great choice for schools, universities, and other higher education organizations 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 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 shines, as it offers native multilingual support for schools to build their platforms with. Not only can educational institutes create custom content types but they can also translate it into several languages, which makes Drupal the best CMS for international organizations. 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 that dabble in 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.