Case Study: How Drupal is used to support a lecture class

Summary

I use Drupal to support all of the classes I teach.  For most of these, Drupal is simply used as a convenient tool for sharing documents.  However, for one of my classes, a significant project requires students to create materials on this site.

Sharing Documents

I have found Drupal to be a very convenient tool for sharing documents with both current and potential students.  Drupal allows individual pages to be protected so that they are only visible to select users.  For example, my Drupal home page is visible to everyone (no login required).  This allows me to share my schedule, general policies, etc. with anyone without requiring that they be enrolled one of my classes.  On this home page are links to each of my individual classes.

Web pages for my courses (ex. Fundamentals of Chemistry and Chemistry in Our World) are also 'open', which allows potential students to see syllabi and a basic outline of the material available.  However, the bulk of information on this site is protected so that it can only be viewed by students who are "enrolled" in this course.  I have set this up so that students generally cannot see the content of other classes.  For example, students in my Fundamentals of Chemistry class cannot view content in my Chemistry in Our World class.  However, because I control the protection scheme, I have this setup so that students in 'related' classes are allowed to view content in other related classes.  Thus, nursing students in my Intro to Organic Chemistry class are allowed to view the content for my Fundamentals of Chemistry class (which is prerequisite that students may have taken from either me or another faculty member).

The information stored on the course web pages generally consists of handouts of slides used in lecture ("PowerPoints"), copies of old exams, and supplemental information.  Some of this supplemental information is shared in class and takes advantage of the tools available within Drupal.  For example, it is difficult to show a three-dimensional molecule on a two-dimensional white board (particularly with my lack of drawing ability).  However, I have a Java applet that allows me to show interactive images of molecules. (For example, this is an image of cholesterol).

Student Papers

In my Chemistry in Our World class, students are required to create on online identity or 'role'.  They are then assigned two or three papers that must be writen using the web-based editor and saved on my site.  After the due dates, these papers are viewable by all students in this class.  Students are required to post online comments on several of these papers.  Protected fields are built into these pages that allow me to post grades and comments on the paper that can only be viewed by the content author.  In order to protect the identity of the authors of posts and comments, a module is used so that the author listed for each paper and all comments are the role-play identities and not their user names.  Thus, unless students share their identies, all of their posts are "anonymous".

Other tools

I make use of a limited number of additional tools available in Drupal.  For one of my classes, I give a short "pre-quiz" online so that I can get a bit of an idea of what students do and do not know when they enter this class.  This semester, I will also be requiring students to do a simple mapping project where students will find the location of several sites.  The results from individual students will then be automatically combined to provide a summary of data from all students.  Finally, I use an unofficial evaluation  of the online component of this class that I give near the end of each semester for one of my classes.