I’m working on a higher ed implementation, but would be more than happy to share ideas and support.
We would also like to use BP for an educational ed purpose. For the moment we are trying to make some money available to hire an developer to come up with a Wiki solution, where registered members could write articles and share their knowledge within the community. But as always in such projects it is hard to get some money 
I’ll hope someone sees the big potential in a Wiki Plugin and come up with an open source version.
Please share ur ideas, i’m very interested in what you are doing in ur ed projects.
We are building a worldwidy-community for students of englisch language and linguistics. A mayor part will be the integration of PmWiki. We have a first alpha-version running up now. I will not post the link for the next 2 weeks. But if someone writes a mail i can give the access.
Tim.Schmidt@uni-osnabrueck.de
Ahah i’m doing the same thing 
Yes, I’m running BuddyPress at the University of Lincoln and have blogged about it here: http://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2009/02/17/buddypress-a-universitys-social-network/
Has anyone taken a look at Deki WIki? It is most impressive! We use it to run our 32 school websites: http://dearbornschools.org/schools
I would love a Deki Wiki implementation or plugin. Deki is so powerful and they do have an open source version. Take a look at our school sites.
Right now for our WPMU+BP setup we have the following plugins:
Set Privacy Settings – We created a walled garden so that no blogs are public unless requested by the teacher.
Limit Admin Menus – Allows me some control over the student blogs and what they can access in their admin panels like Privacy Settings, plugins, etc.
Limit of three blogs per student which was a BP hack on the Create Blog page.
LDAP Auth for WPMU – Only staff and students can enter.
Content Monitor – Scans posts and comments for keywords to cut down on cyber-bullying.
And a few others for appearances etc.
Anyone else have additional plugins for education?
I’m also working on this one, but somewhat dff.. i will be using it for our alumni portal..
I just want to connect them back again..!
It’s been a little while and we now have 150 users and 138 blogs. Here are what teachers are using it for:
– Student Journals in AP Bio, Bio, and Forensic Science. Daily postings
– An interactive story creation tool for 1st graders
– A student newspaper/news type website with the Community Blog plugin for an after school enrichment program
– ePortfolios for Multimedia Students in Middle School
– ePortfolios for High school Graphic Design students
I am trying to limit access to those who need it or are wanting to use it. Later in April I plan on sending out a mass email to teachers letting them know about the new website.
wow, ur project is cool,
can you share a little info on what plugins you used..?
thanks..
– Aron
Actually I submitted a story to the Community Blog. It is on the homepage now. BuddyPress in K-12 Education.
I have a design concepts teacher who is introducing it to his students today and they will be creating ePortfolios which I will be making public. If I remember I will share their blog links here so you can see how the students are using it.
If anyone is in “education” and wants to contact me so we can share ideas via phone, please message me here and we can talk. I am pretty excited about what our students are doing with BP and WPMU.
I, too, am thinking about using BuddyPress along with Moodle in a higher education environment. I’ve been using the latter for almost two years with pretty good success, but WPMU is impressive and calls to me as an administrator and user.
I’m always curious to share experiences and recommendations.
I’m working on a 9-12 installation:
http://odysseyblogs.org (that’s just the testing site)
and we are, most likely, moving to Moodle next year. Currently we’re using Ning and eCollege. I’d love to make some contacts with folks using BuddyPress with secondary students and if you happen to be using Moodle to that would be a bonus. I’m available at:
distanceed@gmail.com.
Cheers.
I’m currently contemplating moving a network of educators to the BP framework as we currently use WordPress.
My only problem is that BP is fairly limited at the moment in terms of sharing.
We need groups to have file sharing capabilities as well as blog post updates appearing within them – two things which it currently doesn’t do.
Ideally these would run out of the box.
But it looks like I might have to magically pull some time out of my hat and start coding some plugins – not my ideal.
Another alternative we looked at was Elgg… it has the feature set we require but I find it really clunky to use, navigate and customize. I much prefer the ‘design’ of BP and WordPress.
elgg was mainly designed for educational usages. 
bp doesn’t offer file sharing, but does offer blog post updates… what exactly r u looking for?
We’re using WPMU and BuddyPress (just starting with BuddyPress, haven’t really publicized it yet while we work out the kinks) for eportfolios at Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York.
http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios
and
http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/social .
Very exciting possibilities…
Hi Socialpreneur. As far as I can see on anyone’s BP installation, it does not support blog post updates within groups.
Wickedbob,
Look at Community Blogs for BuddyPress (https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-community-blogs). You can turn a normal blog into a Community Blog or a Group Blog.
How do you handle fullname/real name in these school community sites:
1. students can just fill in whatever they like in the standard BP fullname field?
2. or did you add code to check for a two-part name?
3. or do you have code that synchronizes the firstname and lastname fields in wp_usermeta with the fullname field in BP xprofile?
4. did you create a custom xprofile field for lastname and use fullname for first name?
I still haven’t figured out what the best solution is…
Also how do you keep track of members when the admin areas use the usernames? Did you find a way to synchronize usernames with fullnames? What about blognames/urls?
Chris Kenniburg, is your Set Privacy plugin available somewhere? Is it a regular WP(MU) plugin?
Hello all,
I’m building a BP install for use by people working or interested in new media research. For now, we’re targeting video game (so called serious games) studies, by may evaluate expanding later.
I’ve found that the most requested feature by teachers in the testing phase was being able to easy add reading material, including amazon lists, bits of their own work, and reading assignments.
Second to those are requests of grading and student management tools. There are a few good plugins available for WP (gradebook for starters) that all seem to work with client blogs. However, they must first be evaluated for FERPA compliance.
Any other suggestions, specifically those that would allow researchers / teachers to collaborate would be extremely helpful.
That project is interesting.
What plugins are you using?
Best Regards,
Jan Manzer
Jan Manzer
There is a new video about our project: http://www.elloandfriends.uni-osnabrueck.de
Maybe you are interessted in that.
You can embed it with:
<embed src=”http://www.wtv.uni-osnabrueck.de/wp-content/plugins/video/wpp.swf?guid=XuCElF0x” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”640″ height=”388″ allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true”></embed>
Ciao Tim
