Faculty Web presence grows with Plone via Enfold Server, Proxy

Site	Faculty Web presence grows with Plone via Enfold Server, Proxy
Industry	Education
Location	United States
Case study written by	Enfold Systems
Contact	Enfold Systems

Houston Community College gets a user-friendly system that Windows-trained administrators are comfortable maintaining.

Overview

“The Learning Web is the creative platform on which we will build a twenty-first century learning environment. If we construct it correctly, it will fundamentally change and revolutionize the way we do business. It will lead the way.”

Dr. Zachary R. Hodges, President, Houston Community College Northwest

Business need

With students increasingly depending on the Internet for information, Houston Community College Northwest needed to make more of its course resources available online. Faculty members needed the ability to build and manage their own Web presences, with a platform that was easier to use and more accessible than the college’s course management system.

Solution

Enfold Server and Enfold Proxy, plus training services provided by Enfold and Plone Bootcamps

Benefits

Faculty-member presence on the Web has grown tremendously, increasing student satisfaction and laying groundwork for better academic performance.

About Houston Community College Northwest

The Houston Community College System is one of the largest community college systems in the United States, serving more than 55,000 students in Houston and the surrounding area. Northwest College is one of five area colleges in the system, which also includes a health sciences college and a distance education program. The system provides courses for transfer to four-year institutions as well as terminal degrees, continuing education, corporate training and certificates in more than 70 fields of work.

Course management blues

In 2000, Houston Community College Northwest purchased a site license for a course management system. Among the college president's priorities was for faculty members to place their course syllabi online. But after three years, usage of the new system began to level off at a much lower level than expected. Nonusers said the system was too cumbersome and did not meet their expectations for a Web platform.

Instructional Web designer Jordan Carswell realized that while the course management system was a necessary part of the college’s online presence and was critical to distance education efforts, the college would have to offer an alternative if it expected its faculty to move into a digital, online paradigm.

“It's simple: You've got a lot of different kinds of people, and you can't have just one kind of technology,” Carswell says, citing a presentation he later attended that validated his thinking at the time. “I realized that we needed to offer choices.”

Carswell's idea was to take advantage of open-source Web technology to create a site specifically for instruction, with tools that empowered faculty and staff members to build their own online presences. The software needed to be customizable, use open standards and follow accessibility guidelines. Content should be available to the public. In short, the platform needed to be simple, modular and open.

The open-source Plone content management system caught Carswell's attention because of its intuitive interface compared to the course management system. “Plone functions much more closely to the types of content management experiences people have on the Web,” he says, citing sites like Flickr and YouTube as roughly similar, familiar examples.

Carswell says Plone also was attractive because it was a mature, competitive system, easy to develop and manage, with a very active user community and many third-party products available.

Carswell put together a basic site, called the Learning Web, and chose to introduce it first to a group especially underrepresented in the course management system. He started showing English department faculty members how to post their course materials, and “it kind of grew organically from there,” he says.

Finding comfort with Plone

In fact, the Learning Web soon became too successful. “We got to the point where we reached critical mass with the Zope server,” Carswell says. When he asked the college’s Windows-trained technical support staff to set up a proxy server using Apache, “They looked at me like: 'Why are you giving us more work to do? We're not trained in any of these things.'”

That’s when Carswell and a colleague from another of the system’s area colleges contacted Enfold Systems. Soon they had moved the Learning Web to Enfold Server and Enfold Proxy, which increased system administrators’ comfort with Plone by letting them manage the system with their existing Windows Server skills, including easily setting up proxy servers with Internet Information Services (IIS) for better security and performance.

“The business requirements change when you move from a development to a production environment,” Carswell says. With Enfold Server and Proxy, the college gets the best of both worlds: the open-source flexibility of Plone, plus easy administration. “They're extremely professional products,” he says, allowing the college to “have the same kind of relationship as with other vendors.”

With this platform in place, plus training provided by Enfold and Plone Bootcamps, Carswell has been able to focus on customizations, including a look-and-feel and several content types. The custom member folder, where each faculty member places all content, displays contact information plus the faculty member's choice of an automatically generated content list or a customizable home page. Other content types Carswell created include course folder, syllabus and reading list. He also added third-party products for blogs, bookmarks, help centers, image galleries and wikis.

Eventually the four other area colleges in the system adopted the Learning Web too, and the sites have increased faculty Web presence tremendously. Carswell says members generally find the Learning Web easy to use and adaptable to their needs, and they feel empowered to shape its future development.

Based on their suggestions, Carswell sees the Learning Web adding new presentation capabilities for content collections of special interest to faculty members. “More and more, they'll be the narrators for the media that students consume in their courses,” he predicts.