Curricular change management with Git and Drupal: A tool to support flexible curricular development workflows

The Software Enterprise at ASU aims at equipping students with practical knowledge of modern software practices through a multi-year instructional sequence that employs an iterative feedback pedagogical model in order for graduates to be adequately prepared for the workforce upon graduation. By means of the Software Enterprise Website, the community of teaching practitioners in this area having similar beliefs and approaches can find a great deal of support and free resources for the purpose of Software Engineering Education. The goal of this project is to incorporate a versioning tool to a Content Management Framework (CMF) that allows the website administrator to create, moderate and publish content revisions, particularly that of the Curricular Modules which comprise of content representing topics offered in courses, while versioning the actual content using GitHub, a web-based repository hosting service. In this case, the CMF used was Drupal 7, which is PHP-written and open-source, and provides a back-end framework for a broad range of web sites worldwide from blogs and microsites to collaborative social communities. The versioning module was developed in PHP while employing the Drupal 7 API for menu structuring and CMS integration, and the GitHub API for versioning and performing easy syncing with contents on GitHub via a RESTful interface.