Part of an email to an Open Education member:

Beyond the weblogging/forum/collaborative aspects of Drupal, there are two main features that I think puts it in front of the CMS's I have looked at:

1) The news feed aggragation and rss syndication in Drupal.
2) The taxonomy system.

I'm using taxonomy_dhtml.module on the test site which, when coupled with syndication.module, expands both the ability to push and pull rss syndication. Without them, Drupal provides RSS syndication for the individual blog sites and the main home page. When installed together, Drupal can syndicate rss via the vocabulary terms in the taxonomy, or combinations there of. Select "more" under the XML syndication icon in the right menu.

Drupal also has, even without those modules installed, the ability to create news feed bundles which are subsets of the main news aggregation collected and displayed on the drupal site. Additionally, although I have not experimented with it yet, the taxonomy system has some complex features for cross-indexing and relating vocabulary terms and, consequently, nodes.

Given these features, Drupal seems to be well-suited for distributing and receiving xml content. It could act as a host for creating content--by one or multiple users via the individual blogs, forums and other collaborative tools. The real work would come from implementing the learning object template into Drupal so that it could both produce and recieve learning objects via RSS.

And, using what's already there, Drupal could be modified to permanently store incoming RSS into selected bundles, creating a permanent searchable database of available learning objects. Note that Drupal already has a "blog it" feature which the user selects from within the news feed section. I would think that configuring Drupal to do this automatically shouldn't be too terribly difficult. I imagine it could be done using specifically enabled news feed bundles which would input the items into a previously selected vocabulary and term in the taxonomy applied to that bundle.

So any teacher could also have a Drupal site which would have a forum, chatrooms, individual blogsites for hosting classes--seems a better setup than what I'm doing with a PostNuke site for a distance ed writing class at FSU.

At the end of the semester, the teacher need only remove student accounts (I'm thinking profile.module could eventually be modified to include class, section, term fields so that the teacher could remove all accounts for a given class with one admin feature) . Meanwhile, Drupal acts as permanent site for the teacher for receiving and tracking new learning objects. One installation for it all.