Jean-Paul Vosmeer, Founder and COO of React Online and initiator of the Drupal Open University initiative, discusses the vital role of Drupal in academia. He shares insights on how the initiative aims to integrate Drupal into higher education, empowering students with real-world skills. The conversation highlights developing standardized educational materials and engaging the community for resources. Vosmeer also addresses the challenges faced by newcomers and the roadmap for future collaborations that will keep Drupal relevant in tech education.
The Drupal Open University Initiative aims to integrate Drupal into academic curricula, promoting its use among future web developers and emphasizing community involvement.
Curriculum development for the initiative is collaborative and focuses on overcoming misconceptions about Drupal's complexity by showcasing its practical applications in real-world projects.
Deep dives
The Drupal Open University Initiative
The Drupal Open University Initiative is a community-driven effort aimed at incorporating Drupal into university curricula, fostering a new generation of Drupal developers. This initiative seeks to democratize access to Drupal education by open sourcing existing educational material, making it easier for universities to integrate Drupal into their courses. By promoting understanding of open source principles alongside Drupal, the initiative hopes to attract students to consider Drupal as a viable tool for modern web development. The focus is on creating a pipeline of students who are not only familiar with Drupal but also understand its community and culture.
Curriculum Development and Community Engagement
Curriculum development for the Drupal Open University is collaborative, leveraging the expertise of educators involved in teaching Drupal across various institutions. The initiative encourages contributions from multiple stakeholders, including existing educators and organizations, to create diverse course offerings that align with academic standards. The use of a centralized repository for educational resources promotes consistency and allows for updates as new versions of Drupal are released, ensuring the material remains relevant. Additionally, the initiative actively seeks to build partnerships with universities to encourage the adoption of Drupal in their programs.
Challenges and Strategies for Adoption
One significant challenge the initiative faces is overcoming the perception that Drupal is complex compared to other CMS platforms like WordPress. This challenge can be addressed by showcasing real-world applications of Drupal that appeal to students and highlighting its capabilities in solving contemporary web development problems. By integrating project-based learning into the curriculum, such as developing applications that connect with popular services like Spotify, students can engage with Drupal in a practical way that illustrates its strengths. The initiative also aims to emphasize the community aspect of Drupal, illustrating how collaboration and open-source contributions can provide enriching experiences.
Future Goals and Outreach Efforts
Future goals for the Drupal Open University Initiative include expanding the number of partnerships with educational institutions and developing a structured roadmap for curriculum content that evolves with the needs of the education sector. Plans to integrate Drupal's potential in teaching modern web technologies, such as headless CMS and community contributions, are also on the agenda. Furthermore, the initiative aims to create engagement by reaching out not only to computer science departments but also to interdisciplinary programs that could benefit from teaching Drupal. Engaging different levels of education, from vocational colleges to universities, will be a focal point for expanding Drupal's presence in academia.
Today we are talking about The open university initiative, Drupal in academia, and Fostering Drupal Education with guest Jean-Paul Vosmeer. We’ll also cover Artisan as our module of the week.
How old: created in Sep 2024 by alejandro cabarcos though recent releases are by crzdev, both of metadrop
Versions available: 1.3.8, which support Drupal 10 and 11
Maintainership
Actively maintained, release in the last week
Security coverage
Documentation: no, but a lengthy README that includes developer notes
Number of open issues: 7 open issues, 5 of which are bugs, but 3 are postponed
Usage stats:
170 sites
Module features and usage
After installing the theme, there is a drush command to generate a subtheme, or you can manually duplicate an included starterkit. You also need to run a couple of npm commands to pull in all the front end libraries, and build the CSS files
Once you set the subtheme as your site default, you can customize a variety of ways the site looks, including the fonts and weights to use for heading and default text, the colour and padding of various elements, border weights, border radius, and more.
The customizations are grouped into tabs. The base tab includes a colour palette, base font, and link styling. Additional tabs include page layout, header, responsive, and footer, also breadcrumb, headings, display headings, buttons, forms, and components
Artisan also provides a toggle to expose extra customization options for dark mode, so if you want your site to give users the option to switch back and forth between normal and dark, this is extremely powerful, but does make for some very long configuration pages
You can create and save presets, for easy creation of reusable palettes
There is also a companion Artisan Styleguide module that provides a page that previews the theme style applied to an extensive list of elements
Last year I was considering making a more configurable subtheme of Olivero for the Event Platform initiative, so I was excited to read about Artisan in a metadrop blog post we’ll include in the show notes
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