[wp-edu] Making the Case for WP in University Setting

[Alexandre Enkerli]

Hi,

Been using WP in diverse contexts, including some of my activities as
an instructor.
After talking with diverse people needing advice about Web solutions
for all sorts of things, I came to the realization that it'd be
incredibly useful to have a university-supported install of WordPress
(Multi-Site and hopefully BuddyPress-enabled).

It's a big institution, so it can be difficult to request such things.
Actually, the communications department is in the RFP phase of
implementing a new (commercial) CMS, so energies are spent elsewhere.

We use Moodle as the main course management system for most of the
community, though the business school uses FirstClass for the same
purposes. Many faculty members are dissatisfied with their course
management system and, clearly, there's a need for something which
goes beyond individual courses. This is a university with a strong
involvement in the local community and there are many projects by
students, staff, and faculty which could use an online space as a kind
of “university commons”.
What's more, it'd be interesting to have some people do innovative
work through WordPress. A dream I have is to use WP as a repository
for “learning objects”. Such projects can be done independently, but
they're more interesting if they're hosted on university servers.
Way back when, universities had “personal homepages”, for all
affiliated individuals. Why can't we have WP sites and BuddyPress
profiles?

Does anyone have advice on getting an academic institution to accept
WP on their servers? I'll try to prepare a dossier, pointing to work
done at diverse institutions (good thing Boone paved the way), and
describing practical cases from faculty initiatives. It even sounds
like the fear of having sensitive data held off-site could be a
factor. But any insight as to how such a process went at other
institutions would be very useful.

Thank you.
--
Alex Enkerli
http://Enkerli.com