[wp-edu] What features and what kind of use do you need?

[Claudio Simeone]

Hi all,

I was reading other threads in this list about your projects, so I
have some questions for all people that want to use WP for educational
purposes. Just for curiosity and share our experiences.
I'm currently involved in an educational project with the University
of Naples "Federico II" in Italy. We currently use WP to support the
educational activities in 52 courses - basically with lessons posted
on the site, enriched with images, videos, links, podcasts, downadable
documents (pdf, zip, ppt etc...).
In the first release (september 2007) we choose to not allow the
students to post comments and interact with teachers (comments are
closed). But the next release, (probably in the first week of next
month) will have more than 100 new courses and for each course we'll
give a little community, where registered students can comment the
lessons, do surveys on course topics, stay tuned with classroom news
and post links to web resources (papers, videos, web sites etc...)

My questions for you are:

What are the WordPress features that you think be useful for your projects?
You want to build a community of teachers and students, give a blog to
every student, let students post articles?
What type of interaction do you think is the best for a good
educational project?
At the moment WP - a simple installation of WP - allows only comments.
It's ok for you or you need more?
For your needs is better WordPress Mu? Or you need custom features?
Do you have already considered to use other platforms (Joomla, Drupal,
Moodle...) and why do you think that WP is more suitable for you?

Thanks in advance,
(and sorry for my awful english)
Claudio