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Jeff Chandler

WordCampus a Conference Devoted to Using WordPress in Higher Education

Higher education is a subject that some WordCamps have tackled over the years, but what if there was an event entirely devoted to it? That’s the idea Rachel Carden is proposing with WordCampus. The idea started off as a tweet but quickly gained momentum with others in the community.

WordCampus is an event that would cover topics such as, how to manage a large-scale network of faculty blogs, abiding by FERPA regulations, or how to best implement single sign-on that integrates with Active Directory.

Carden outlines her idea in detail on Post Status and says that even though camp is in the event’s name, it doesn’t imply that it would be an official WordCamp event. She’s also open to organizing an event not affiliated with the WordPress Foundation.

If you’re interested in speaking, sponsoring, or attending WordCampus, please fill out the survey and help spread the word. The more interest Carden generates, the more likely it is that the WordPress Foundation will back the event.

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9 responses to “WordCampus a Conference Devoted to Using WordPress in Higher Education”

    • Yeah, it’s unclear if the event will be named WordCampus because of that kind of confusion. If WordCamp US would have been named WordCamp NA for North America, we wouldn’t have this problem, though WordCamp US was first.

        • However much we love the name, which is a lot, we’re open to changing it if need be. We don’t want that to get in the way of what could be a great event. But, for now, it’s what we’re uniting under and it’ll be the name until it isn’t. Plus, if it has to change, we’re going to enjoy it for as long as we can. :)

  2. As a long-time higher education faculty member and developer of an early campus website (mid-1990s) who despises many of the built-for-higher-ed content management systems and who uses wordpress extensively… I’ll just say that I think this sounds like a fine idea.

    Right now it is difficult to get traction on behalf of wordpress with campus IT folks, who don’t understand wordpress, much less how to use it in an academic context. They tend to write it off as some kind of funky blogging tool, and they believe that the expensive commercial products are the only viable tools.

    • We are making headway, though. There are a lot of IT folks that are starting to recognize the power of WordPress, and there are even more Marketing/Communications folks that are WP evangelists & are exerting their own power to get things done. It’s impressive just how many schools are using WordPress, and in just how many ways they’re using it.

      The schools run the gamut from small private colleges to large universities, they’re using it as the institution-wide CMS, as the CMS for individual departments, as an LMS, as a blogging system, as an app API, as course textbooks, as student portals/commons and more.

    • You do realize, of course, that WordPress is used in a huge number of various ways at a large contingent of colleges & universities throughout the world, right? I hope you also realize that quite a few of the most popular plugins for WordPress (and the most popular plugins for enterprise usage in WP) were developed within higher ed, too.

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