Open Source CMS

This summer term I am teaching (in addition to the EDTC 3123 -- preservice teacher technology course) EDTC 5153: Computer-based Instructional Development. I have six graduate students enrolled--none from the College of Education. I have two Chemistry master's candidates, two from TESL (one master's, one doctoral), and two master's candidates from International Studies. It will be nice to get some students from our program in these classes as well.

At any rate, the course focuses on desiging and creating web-based instruction. I initially designed the course to be your basic instructional design, website design and development class, and then I thought better of it. It seems to me that we're past that now. As I looked through my webhosting package from BlueHost, I noticed that I had access to about ten or so different CMS packages.

So I thought to myself (having just gone through the process of helping choose a new COURSE management system for OSU) that a more relevant class might be how to design the instruction and how to evaluate different CMS packages--because I have access, right?--and develop the instruction in a CMS. That seems more "real world." So I eagerly installed instances of the following:

• Drupal


• Geeklog


• Joomla


• Mambo


• PHP-Nuke


• phpWCMS


• phpWebsite


• Post-Nuke


• TYPO3


• Xoops


• Moodle


• BlackBoard (I just used the course OSU made for our class)

So how's it going? Well, what does CMS stand for? Course Management System (as I was thinking) or Content Management System (as most of these are). I think the course is going well, and we're getting a lot of really practical experience. But it would have been nice if more had been COURSE management systems.