The core functionality of the P2PU site comes from the Organic Groups module (OG), which provides the course environment within which all course interactions occur. In our courses, these interactions are typically posting and commenting on: forum discussions and course materials. We have integrated a 3rd party IRC chat, but this is not a part of Drupal itself.

Course communication is controlled by the messaging, notifications and organic groups notifications modules. While we had some teething problems, and every now and again get duplicate notifications, it works fairly well. By default, all members of a course are notified when there is new content (node or comment). Members can manage their own subscriptions, and can specify the frequency of notifications. Kyle, the creator of Eduglu has created an organic groups mailing list module which we are investigating, and may prove to be a better solution, allowing users to respond to notifications directly from email.

Course membership is taken care of by OG - each course has one or more course admins who can approve/deny membership, and then once approved, members can post content to a course. You can choose whether or not applications are moderated or if users can become members immediately.

We use panels to give us more advanced layout, although at times this has caused some problems - perhaps this is just because of the way it was initially set up using redirects when viewing course content - there may be a better way to do this, but we haven’t investigated yet.

We’re starting to use the Features module to allow the code to be more easily distributed, and would like to move to setting up an installation profile, like Eduglu uses. Missing pieces that are requested often: a fully functional, drupal integrated wiki, and a more integrated chat (so chat history can be stored and accessed from within the course).

Some challenges:

• Email notifications: Tracking down problems has been tricky at times.
• Spam - the site registration process is not moderated so, spammers can register and post content to the site - while we use Mollom to prevent spam, a fair amount still gets through.
• Server performance - we've run into issues where apache crashes, or we're forced to restart, not sure why.
• How best to set up departments, or groupings of courses (OG for Drupal 7 appears to allow for groups within groups).