Book Image

Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

As social networks become more popular, their role in the classroom has come under scrutiny. Drupal offers a wide variety of useful tools for educators. Within a single Drupal site, you can set up social bookmarking, podcasting, video hosting, formal and informal groups, rich user profiles, and other features commonly associated with social web communities. "Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition" teaches you how to create your own social networking site to advance teaching and learning goals in the classroom, while giving you complete control over features and access. Communicate with students, share learning resources, and track assignments through simple tasks with this hands-on guide.In this book you will learn to install and configure the default Drupal distribution and then extend it to include blogs, bookmarks, a media sharing platform, and discussion forums. The book also covers how to organize your site to easily track student work on the site, and how to control who has access to that information. Additionally, it teaches you how to make the site easy to use, how to maintain the site, and how to ask for and receive help in the Drupal community.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Drupal as a video hosting and processing platform


Drupal can be configured to work as a fully functional YouTube or Google Video clone, by combining video processing modules, such as Video (http://drupal.org/project/video) or Media Mover (http://drupal.org/project/media_mover) and other modules, such as Views. Setting up the environment to serve video requires some familiarity with setting up Linux-based servers and an open source video conversion utility called FFmpeg. The advantage of building your own video-processing site is that it gives you full control over all aspects of your material with none of the privacy concerns, or concerns over inappropriate content that you may have with YouTube or Google Video.

Additionally, if your academic program needs to support the hosting of large amount of video, using either Video or Media Mover, will have performance benefits. As noted earlier, using Video or Media Mover requires a more robust server environment, but the benefits of hosting your...