Joomla! in the Classroom: Students and Instructors Finding Success with Joomla through the CloudAccess.net Platform

Helping educators put Joomla in the hands of thousands of students worldwide

We started our company with a set of core values, and the first value on that list is “Refer to yourself as a teacher. We are all teachers at heart.” We believe wholeheartedly in education. We understand that education can be critical in unlocking potential and opening personal and professional doors. That’s why we developed Joomla! in the Classroom, a program that assists teachers and administrators to implement Joomla into their school curriculum. Through the program we provide hosting, site provisioning and access to our training materials and support team free of charge to any qualified educator or educational institution. The following testimonials are from educators who found success with the program.

Becky Coleman, the yearbook advisor at the Calvary Christian Academy in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, has just started using the Joomla! in the Classroom program and her class size doubled from its original enrollment because students were excited and spread the word throughout the school. Mrs. Coleman commented that, “for a teacher, CloudAccess.net is amazing. I can give my students their own site and watch them go with it instead of spending my time sorting out network and web hosting issues. They also have the freedom to spend more time on their site from home or other locations outside of my classroom.” Becky is a longtime Joomla supporter and found our program after convincing others of Joomla’s viability as a CMS. She’s using the program as a unit of instruction for a business and technology class for high school juniors and seniors.

Amy Baird, an Information Science Professor at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, has incorporated Joomla! in the Classroom into an e-commerce course where students are learning to use shopping carts, payment gateways and other payment systems. They’ve been using the program for a little over a year and, according to Professor Baird, “the students are becoming Joomla experts.”

Ian Byrne is an Instructor at Scoil Mhuire Clane, an adult education college in Clane County, Kildare, Ireland. The school offers face-to-face instruction and online courses in a variety of academic areas. Ian has been teaching students Joomla since 2011. Ian said that the program has been successful and that “students have been really happy with the usability of the CMS. They love the power given to them by the free extensions including those that provide social networking links, lightboxes and banners.” Ian elaborated that “once they had mastered the process of locating, downloading and installing the extensions, they felt in control and were excited about what they could achieve. The ease at which templates could be changed and how professional the site looked got students excited.”

Richard Pearce, owner of Build a Joomla Website, uses Joomla! in the Classroom for his live training classes. He says it’s an ideal solution because students get to continue working on their site long after the formal part of the training is complete. Richard said “the steepest part of the Joomla learning curve is at the start. I find that teaching a beginner the Joomla installation steps reinforces their fears that they can’t build a website themselves. It’s time consuming, technical and therefore intimidating. However Joomla! in the Classroom overcomes this by providing a pre-installed instance of Joomla for each student so I can start introducing the important concepts right away. Better still, each student can continue to work on their site after the class has finished to help reinforce what they have learned. It’s a great solution for both the instructor and the student”.

Dr. Michael Lane and Dr. Mustafa Ally, Lecturers in the School of Informations Systems at the University of Southern Queensland based in Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia, have incorporated Joomla in their Digital Enterprise course over the last two semesters. The major focus of the course is the strategic integration and management of an e-commerce solution in an online business venture.

USQ is one of the leading distance education universities in Australia and over 75 percent USQ students attend courses online. To make course concepts and curriculum relevant to local and international students who are studying through their distance learning programs, Michael and Mustafa chose to incorporate an open source CMS. More specifically, Dr. Ally commented that the aim of the course was “to expose students, working in teams, to the entire website developmental process from the management of the project through to the building and implementation of the site so that some of the practical components could be aligned to the theoretical aspects of the course.”

There are two assessments for the Digital Enterprise course: a written e-commerce strategy and business model, and a prototype website built using core Joomla features. Dr. Lane and Dr. Ally chose Joomla! in the Classroom because, “while it is accepted that using a CMS like Joomla requires minimal special technical skills, the time and knowledge required in downloading, installing, configuring and managing the software and its components had the potential of discouraging and detracting students from the ultimate goal of the course and the assessment. The CloudAccess.net Platform-as-a-Service proved invaluable in enabling us to overcome these problems by providing a ‘ready-to-use’ Joomla development environment.”

Both Lecturers also frequently advised their students to attend CloudAccess.net free & live daily webinars and to browse through our knowledgebase full of how-to tutorials and videos. Dr. Lane commented that “we have made extensive use of Cloudaccess.net's Joomla Knowledgebase, free templates and webinars - these are great resources for introducing students to the basics of developing a Joomla website.” Using these resources, they found that students had “surprisingly fewer queries” about the development of the website, but if questions did arise, they knew they could count on the CloudAccess.net support team to be “exceptionaly efficient and very prompt and helpful.”

The goal of any educational institution is to equip students with the skills and experiences necessary to compete for jobs in a global society. Dr. Lane has confidence in the the Digital Enterprise course because, using Joomla, students get to develop in demand and highly relevant skills in a developing industry. Dr. Lane commented that “if students build a great e-commerce website, it gives them something to show a potential employer, it looks great on their CV and makes them more competitive in the job market." Their students routinely praised Joomla for its ease-of-use and extensibility and regularly reported a high degree of satisfaction with the Digital Enterprise course.

There are several other high schools, colleges, universities and private educational programs using the Joomla! in the Classroom program, and we’re extremely proud to be associated with them and to have helped them in their mission. Simply email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you’re interested or want learn more. We’ll provision and host as many Joomla sites as your students need, we’ll walk you through our training and support systems and we’ll do it all absolutely free of charge. We have certified and accomplished educators on the CloudAccess.net staff and we’re teachers at heart. We’re ready to help you devise a plan for implementing Joomla as part of your curriculum. The only thing we ask in exchange is for you to help us share your story about how you found success with the program.