michael-wojcik / open_eggheads

Open Eggheads: A personal web platform for academic professionals that is easy to use, portable, and extensible

Open Eggheads

Note: This project orginated as student work designed to fulfill the requirements for the Fall 2015 Capstone Design Studio at the Harvard Extension School.

What is Open Eggheads?

A personal web platform for academic professionals that is easy to use, portable, and extensible.

Abstract

The goal of this project is to create a flexible, extensible, personal web platform for professional academics. Specifically, this platform’s target user group will be those who are completing or have completed their graduate studies and are entering the academic job market, and who consequently require a professional web presence with which to market themselves effectively.

Premise

Today’s academic professionals, especially graduate students entering the job market, increasingly need simple, yet compelling, web presences that succinctly convey their educational/research background, interests, and achievements. Such web presences also need to be sustainable for years to come, with room to grow along with the progress of the students/future professors themselves.

Problem

Students, especially graduate students, don’t have the time or expertise to fret over the best way to construct such a web presence. They are busy enough with perfecting their own academic research without the added stress of trying to research the different options for building a website. Furthermore, these students often have a very limited budget for creating and maintaining a website, and so the cost of any potential solution must be as small as possible.

Prior Solutions

The two most popular, “easy-to-use” solutions currently available are not very helpful: [1] online WYSIWYG website builders and [2] open source Content Management Systems (CMS). [1] WYSIWYG website builders (e.g., Squarespace , Weebly , Wix , etc.) may provide a quick-and-dirty solution, but one that is severely lacking in future scalability. [2] Current open source CMS distributions offer excellent, scalable solutions for scholars, departments, etc., but are geared towards usage at the institution-wide scale (e.g., Open Scholar, Open Academy).

Proposed Solution

This project will focus on creating a balanced amalgam of both a WYSIWYG website builder and a full-fledged CMS, with the purpose of helping students’ create web presences that are both easily managed as well as fully extensible based on future needs. The resulting product will primarily consist of an open-source, customized distribution of the Drupal CMS tailored to individual usage by academic professionals, especially graduate students with an eye towards the academic job market. Importantly, this Drupal distribution will also include documentation that is detailed, yet accessible and straightforward, for any potential users.

This product will seek to deliver on the following promise to users: “Build your own professional, academic website in 60 minutes or less.” The resulting websites will include easily accessible information on a student’s research interests/projects, CV, achievements, publications, dissertation, and any other related multimedia, including a student headshot.