The effect of COVID-19 on Higher Education is unheard of and its scale continues to be now no longer understood. Universities and faculties the world over nonetheless don’t recognise what subsequent semesters will appear like.
Regardless of what the future brings, leaders in higher-ed are making ready themselves and their establishments to thrive in a brand new virtual paradigm shift. To do this, they need to ask themselves key questions on streamlining the scholar experience, the college experience, the faraway studying experience, and the virtual infrastructure that offers all of it rise.
Although it’s vital to say manipulate over an unsure international through figuring out assumptions about the destiny and figuring out how your group will respond, the query arises: What’s the maximum crucial element to get right, online?
Your website. This is who you’re online. It’s the platform that offers you the method to attract, engage, and pride your potential college students and supply a continuing experience.
A learning management system, a.k.a. LMS, is a software solution for administering, documenting, tracking, reporting, automating and delivering educational courses or training programs. This concept emerged directly from eLearning and has been around since the late 1990s. LMSs were developed and designed to both help learning students and train employees. It allows the administrator to use data and reporting presenting all contents in an automated online platform.
This technology allows anyone to take courses synchronously and asynchronously – something that might be taken for granted today, but was completely impossible before the invention of the Internet. At least with current characteristics. New learning software may even include approved courses and career paths, based on what you’ve done in the past. Think Netflix recommendations but for educational purposes. Let’s just hope it’s correct.
We’ve talked a lot about Drupal before, whether it’s its business capabilities or how it functions as the perfect CMS. But nowadays everything revolves around Drupal as an LMS. Let’s go through the basics first.
Drupal is free and open source software, so it offers three main attributes: low cost, flexible development through contributions from the open source community, and maximum security.
Drupal as a CMS makes it one of the best possible starting points to develop a Learning Management System. Drupal is multipurpose and highly configurable. It enables publishing articles, images, and multiple files and allows users to include forums, surveys, and blogs while managing users and permissions.
NYC Design researched 3,360 higher ed web sites (Stanford University, University of British Columbia, UC Berkeley, University of Michigan, Cornell University to name a few ), and the findings spotlight that 90% of those websites are constructed using twelve training Content Management Systems. Across all of the styles of institutions—personal, public, or personal non-profit— better ed CMSs (each Open Source) stood tall above the others: WordPress and Drupal—with 40.8% and 19.1% share, respectively.
As examples, the pinnacle 5 US universities (Harvard University, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of California, Berkeley (UCB), and the University of California, Los Angeles) primarily based totally at the QS World University Rankings: USA report, used Drupal improvement offerings to construct their platform.
COVID-19 is impacting pupils’ willingness and readiness to join a Higher Education institute. Research with the aid of McKinsey highlights that 45% of college students considerably affect their emotional preparedness because of COVID-19 and are as a result reluctant to enroll in any college/college. Close to 33% of college students fear approximately the unexpected disruption in studying at some stage in a pivotal 12 months of excessive school.
Therefore, it’s far more than essential to revolutionize the pupil, assist, verify their selection and provide them a customized engagement revel in the use of your maximum effective asset—your internet site—and manual college students via an unbroken adventure from enrollment to graduation.
In an afternoon and age wherein many college students will need to frequent .edu possibly greater than their bodily classroom, establishments of better ed need to suppose in another way approximately the growing fee or legal responsibility in their internet site.
Certainly, one solution is an effective and bendy Open Source Education Content Management System on which 70% of the pinnacle Higher Education establishments websites are built: Drupal.
Drupal is an Open Source platform that may assist create omnichannel virtual stories to attract, enroll, and pride college students, alumni, and faculty, in conjunction with presenting the subsequent benefits:
To review how a pupil’s adventure on a college internet site starts off evolved once they seek to join a web program:
2/third of college students regularly complete step (c) inside simply 4 weeks of beginning on line studies. It means that universities have 4 weeks to transport at par with the potential pupil’s selection-making pace and provide them a customized level to engage.
And here, advertising and marketing offerings, at pace and scale, in a customized way play an essential role. Thus, massive better ed gamers spend on advertising and marketing closely to grow the net enrollment rate, which is obvious from the subsequent analysis.
The CMO Survey performed with the aid of using Duke University highlights that among the 15 enterprise sectors, the usage of Digital Marketing, with an average diploma of 6.20, has contributed the maximum within side the schooling sector. Unsurprisingly, the greater a college spends on advertising and marketing initiatives, the better is the enrollment rate.
The Digital Marketing surroundings consists of all of the virtual channels an organization makes use of to speak with its potential college students, nurture them until they’re prepared to enroll, convert them and sell new enrolments from real college students.
To make their Digital Marketing tasks a success, better ed entrepreneurs do want facts approximately geolocation, prospect demographics, and former history. However, additionally they want facts approximately what their potential college students are doing and searching out proper now. Unfortunately, in maximum institutions, this sort of fact is living in silos and the generation that would orchestrate this prospect adventure isn’t related efficiently to the martech stack.
Drupal is an effective solution to this challenge. Being an Open Source training content material control system, Drupal is without problems integrable with present structures the use of open APIs that permit pupil statistics to waft seamlessly at some point of the institution. Also, Drupal-primarily based totally virtual homes permit better ed entrepreneurs to acquire key prospect statistics that assist them to lay out a complete view of prospects.
With Drupal advertising, better ed markets can:
As a sturdy Higher Ed Content Management solution, Drupal is in the back of a number of the virtual studies which can be a part of the advertising efforts of main universities. There are numerous Drupal advertising modules created through the Drupal network that may be used with Drupal websites to assist with advertising initiatives.
Education must be to all, regardless of caste, creed, gender, or local language. But the undertaking is the way to make it completely handy – 71% of customers with a incapacity depart an internet site that isn’t handy to them.
Back in 2016, a visually impaired scholar filed a lawsuit in opposition to Miami University due to the fact their web sites had been inaccessible with the aid of using college students with disabilities and as a consequence acted as a roadblock for disabled college students to actively take part in numerous courses. As a result, the college changed into compelled to pay $25,000 in repayment and revamp their whole net content, making sure it meets federal net accessibility standards.
These days, college students discover numerous dynamics and complexities surrounding moral practices being observed with the aid of using universities to make knowledgeable choices at the same time as selecting one. And such proceedings replicate a low degree of moral obligations practiced with the aid of using universities.
However, well timed auditing websites for accessibility is time-eating and high-priced too for training institutions. Scott Lissner, Americans With Disabilities Act compliance officer at Ohio State University, requested his crew: How many webpages Ohio State has? The crew replied: “multiply the grains of sand at the shore with the aid of using the celebs within side the heavens’ ‘ to get a near approximation. The actual range is “someplace among 5 and 8 million relying on what definition you`re the usage of and what second in time it is.
Thankfully, you could depend upon Drupal as your training Content Management System, completely ready with capabilities that assist websites in modern virtual surroundings adhere to accessibility standards.
Today’s college students anticipate a comparable personalized experience, from the college internet site, like Amazon and Netflix supply—frictionless, orchestrated, relevant, and immediate. Even web sites of pinnacle universities might not get a lot of interest if the internet site is static and boring.
This is one of the motives why 70% of better ed leaders take into account virtual engagement and their web sites as one of the pinnacle advertising equipment to attract, engage, and convert potential college students
Drupal has splendidly capitalized on this possibility to supply 360-diploma virtual stories which are relevant, immediate, and personalized. Drupal lets in customers to make knowledgeable use of browser history, geolocation, conduct taxonomies, and tool kind to report user’s clicks and conduct at every touchpoint, the use of which they are able to curate a complete imaginative and prescient in their personalized services at a velocity that allows enhance retention and on-line enrolment rate.
For example, the Stanford University internet site leverages Drupal to permit campus participants to effortlessly design, build, grow, and control brand-widespread sites, personalized to person needs, maintaining safety in mind.
University websites are often targeted, leading higher education planners to choose their digital platforms wisely. Open source software (OSS) is generally more secure than proprietary software, and Drupal is no exception. However, you may see some queries floating around the internet asking: Is Drupal safe?
Well, Drupal’s security team is very responsive and always on the lookout for security holes and regularly submits security patches for all actively maintained versions. All security patches have been logged. Drupal is such a powerful educational content management system that it can seamlessly dodge critical security vulnerabilities, including the top 10 security risks identified by OWASP.
This is one of the reasons why the number of security vulnerabilities on Drupal has decreased significantly between 2002 and 2022. In addition, minor releases are more common after the release of Drupal 8 & 9 and the Innovation application continues. This leads to an easy and fast upgrade of Drupal to a better and more secure version.
Most universities and colleges have multifaceted websites that serve a variety of purposes. By using Drupal as your educational content management system, you can take advantage of built-in multisite functionality; Organizations can provide their departments with a powerful set of tools and related documents to communicate with students, staff, and other users through a single system.
Some key facts about Drupal:
One of the main reasons for the success of the Drupal CMS platform is its dedicated Drupal community. They join Drupal to code but stay for the community. Drupal becomes family to them and they work hard to make this community stronger and towards a more experience every day.
It is clear that Drupal is fantastic both as a CMS and, almost by extension, as an LMS. Its open source and free nature makes it affordable; however, it comes with an arduous learning curve that requires at minimum one developer to be on the team. Its versatility and flexibility are ideal for businesses that are growing. However, it can be overwhelming when options begin to accumulate.
Educational websites are used by students, teachers, parents, teachers, friends and visitors, each with various access rights.
Crises like COVID19 can create an environment of fear, forcing the education sector to undergo some digital paradigm shifts; however, the ultimate goal – empowering diverse, well-informed citizens to build society – remains the same.
Higher education leaders must look beyond the immediate challenges and come up with effective long-term solutions to attract, engage and delight their stakeholders: students, parents, trainers and engagement journeys start and continue with your website. Drupal gives you a vibrant digital platform that not only attracts potential customers, but also provides them with a seamless experience, which is why over 70% of top universities are offered by the Drupal educational content management system.
LN Webworks have championed open-source technologies for nearly a decade, bringing advanced engineering capabilities and agile practices to some of the biggest names across media, entertainment, education, travel, hospitality, telecommunications and other industries.
