Quick and Dirty Course Setup

Felt like throwing together a simple module recipe for course creation.  Of course I push ELMS as a collection of modules and settings to run a course management system (or at least manage courses…).  Here’s a quick list of the major modules living under ELMS hood that can get you up and developing a course quickly:

• Outline Designer (Thickbox 1.2, Prepopulate, Ajax required to work)
• Menu Block (great compliment to DHTML Menus and the Book module)
• Nice Menus (use this usability “hack” to make books appear in cool nice menus http://groups.drupal.org/node/16912 )
• DHTML Menus (A must have usability improvement)
• WYSIWYG API (most people like clean text editors so use this with FCK or TinyMCE to do it quickly)
• IMCE (for file / image upload and insertion into your content
• IMCE Wysiwyg API bridge (You’ll need this module too to make it work with the one above)

Using these 3 key modules you can create a quick and dirty framework for course content development.  Adding in some of the core optionals like color, book, comment, tracker, statistics, and upload and you’re most of the way there already!  Pixture is a great little color-wheel enabled theme that I usually use as my base for site creation to get up and running quickly.  Maybe throw in a few roles like “student” and “instructor”, maybe add in an initial book page to your first book so that the outline designer lets you build out the rest of the “course” quickly; who knows!

This may not be a complete recipe but the key to learning is doing.  And not just passive learning, active, hands on learning.  Experience is the best way to learn anything so,  I’m not going to just spoon feed you everything on this blog.  Trust me, I know Drupal is frustrating.  It’s one of the most difficult and frustrating learning processes that I’ve even undertaken (and still can be when learning about new projects).  The point of this blog though is to teach and give people enough knowledge to find direction so they can go off and become experts instead of constantly having to reference them!

Just know that if you learn enough about how these few projects work above that you can start rapidly building course materials!