In 2009 I was working at Camousn College & was given the opportunity to do a WordPress pilot project at the college. We were looking for a solution for faculty who wanted to publish content to the web, but didn’t want the overhead of an LMS. We were using Microsoft FrontPage for many years, but our IT folks were rolling out Windows 7, which didn’t support FrontPage. So the time seemed right for a WordPress project.

A tweet from Tanis Morgan at the JI prompted me to post these resources as they might be a useful starting point for some who are looking to run a WordPress pilot at their institution. The WordPress pilot documentation does contain some links to further resources (although those links might now be dead as it has been 4 years since I created these documents).

Sorry these are in PDF – breaking my own rules of reuse here. Bad OER advocate, bad! But I seem to have lost the original Word docs.

WordPress Pilot Document

Executive summary

Distributed Education would like to run a 9 month pilot project to evaluate the use of the WordPress publishing platform as a possible tool for faculty to use to develop and maintain stand alone websites and/or a blogs.

DE has identified 2 goals for the pilot:

1. The primary goal is to determine the feasibility of using the WordPress platform as a replacement for FrontPage and Contribute for stand alone faculty websites at Camosun.
2. A second goal will be to examine the use of WordPress as a traditional blog platform for faculty who wish to explore blogging as part of their pedagogical practice.

The rationale for this pilot is threefold:

1. The current standard website maintenance tool, FrontPage, has been deprecated by Microsoft and will soon become unsupported.
2. There is still considerable demand from faculty for stand alone websites that live outside of Desire2Learn, yet are still supported by the College (see June 2009 ITS/DE Staff Survey).
3. There has also been demand from faculty, departments and other organizations within the college for assistance from Distributed Education in setting up blogs. In the past 6 months, DE has supported the use of blogs for various projects in a number of schools including Health & Human Services (http://nepalfieldschool.blogspot.com/), Arts and Science (http://asnewsletter.wordpress.com/), and the English Creative Writing Program (http://besidethepoint.net/). These blogs have been developed on platforms outside of Camosun.

Download WordPress Pilot Document (PDF 5 pages)

FrontPage Replacement Rationale

This report provides a rationale as to why WordPress was chosen to replace FrontPage for standalone faculty websites.

Download FrontPage Replacement Rationale (PDF 6 pages)