A WordPress conference for higher education: coming to a campus near you?

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Written By Rachel Cherry

37 thoughts on “A WordPress conference for higher education: coming to a campus near you?”

  1. Did I hear accessibility consulting and WordPress in the same sentence? Of course I’m in. 🙂 Seriously, I think this is a great idea and, while I don’t have a lot of contacts in higher-ed, I’ll pass this on to the ones I do have.

  2. I am working on a “WordPress for Schools” startup that focuses on the K12 market. I’m very interested in contributing my knowledge and expertise on how WordPress solves problems for our public schools and how that can be applied to the Higher Ed market.

  3. This is the coolest idea I have heard in a long time. I know it will take some serious planning, but I also have a gut feeling that people will come out of the woodwork if you make it happen. I’m signed up for the list… let me know if there’s anything I can do to help!

  4. I run WordPress for a University, and am one of the organizers of the local WordCamp. Just last week, I was talking and wondering about a higher-ed focused WordPress community, and today someone emailed me a link to this article.

    This really needs to happen.

  5. Rachel-

    This is a fantastic idea. Not only would we want to attend, but we would also be interested in sponsoring. LearnDash has a strong presence in higher education – it’s an area we are care about.

    I’ve filled out the form on at wordcampus.org

    -Justin

  6. Sometimes you learn a random fact that can benefit someone down the track. I think today is that day. My brother and I toured MIT back in the late 80’s and one of the things we learned on the tour is that Boston has more colleges in their city walls than any other metropolitan city. Apparently it’s more than 100:

    http://study.com/list_of_colleges_in_boston_massachusetts.html

    I might suggest Boston as the ideal location for the first WordCampus as there would likely be an adequate supply of participants given that little fact.

    In any event, best of luck to you and your upcoming event. I think it’s going to be a hit!

  7. Just registered our interest in both attending and helping sponsor this. We have a lot of contacts at schools throughout North America and I bet many of them could organize regional events. It would be seriously cool to coordinate something where a few were happening at the same time in different locations to cut down on travel costs and reach a large number of folks. Definitely keep us in the loop as discussion progress!

  8. Hey
    A few UK folks are planning the same – it is very early days for us but would be happy to share contacts and ideas or partner up
    Followed on twitter
    Pat

  9. This looks great. I’ve been watching this percolate for a while, but haven’t yet commented. I work with WP part-time unrelated to higher ed, but also work part-time with the Public Knowledge Project, building tools for open access academic publishing on a non-WP (open source) platform.

    Do you see the conference overlapping with library tech, publishing and archiving in any way? Or is it mostly focused on the large networks many universities run for students, teachers and marketing?

    • If it’s work being done in higher education, then yes. All are welcome. We’re also considering broadening our scope to all formal education, so basically K-12 to higher ed. If you’d like to get involved, and stay in the loop, visit http://wpcampus.org and share your info. We’d love to hear more about your work!

  10. Count me in. James Madison University (Harrisonburg, VA) set up WPMU in 2010. We now have over 500 WordPress sites and over 10,000 unique logins. We have integrated our installation with Active Directory and the Student Administrative system so that official class rosters can be synchronized with WP site membership. We use it for instruction and scholarship. Each site is different but almost all are tied to courses, many of which meet year after year to continue building the site. For us, WP is a platform for (i) publishing non-traditional scholarship (e.g. movies, oral histories, timelines, maps, podcasts, mashups and remixes, infographics, digital image exhibits, etc.), for (ii) authoring multi-modal compositions, and for (iii) hosting digital humanities projects.

  11. We’d be interested. We’ve been building WP solutions for Harvard, Stanford, MIT among others.

    A note on the name. It is wonderful (WordCampus) but is too close to WordCamp US and will cause confusion.

  12. Hello every one. We are helping universities, here in Morocco, out with their digital strategies. We actually started using ourselves “wp” as of 2012 as a CMS and an event management system for our own conferences (event organization is one of our business lines). We are now implementing wp as a content management system, an e-learning system, a match-making system with companies for student internships, an open innovation system for research labs, as community platform with buddypress…
    We are just starting also to collaborate with university IT guys to hook it up to their administrative applications (enrollment, library, human resources…).
    We were, so far, frustrated by the lack of interest of the education communities in wp but I am glad to discover this initiative. Thanks Rachel.
    We are interested by organizing a major international event around WP in Education in Marrakesh in spring 2017.

  13. Would love to attend such an event. We use WordPress at our higher ed institution here in Barcelona for faculty and student blogs.

  14. I’d love to see a gathering like this focus not just on the business applications of WordPress in higher ed (institutional websites, IT infrastructure, etc) but also on practical teaching and learning applications. For example, it would be awesome if attendees could collaborate on a list of themes and plugins that work really well under typical educational models. I’ve filled out the form and look forward to seeing what you come up with!

  15. @bamadesigner check out https://www.odu.edu/ts/wordpress ; may be a good partner or launch campus; can get you contacts if you’d like. Plus my employer, @inmotionhosting has an EDU offering and may be able to assist you with something more specific related to WordPress for higher EDUs via WordCampus. Feel free to contact me. via email or twitter @hvyw8

  16. I am most definitely IN. As I mentioned back in my post in early August, https://malartu.org/2015/08/is-a-wordcamp-higher-ed-or-word-campus-possible/ , Malartu Inc is also very interested.

    One of my biggest concerns, though, is the making it truly accessible and interesting to faculty. That’s actually been one of the problems with most WordCamps – not only do WordCamps tend to be commerical website-oriented, many of them are not very accessible to faculty/students for teaching and learning applications. We need a place where all the “Teaching with WP” and “Domain of One’s Own” and Connected Course folks can come together.
    Please feel free to contact me. @econproph

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