Talking Drupal #494 - AI in EDU

Today we are talking about AI in EDU, how it can provide
efficiencies, and how you might start using it today with guests
Brian Piper & Mike Miles . We’ll also cover External Entities
as our module of the week.


For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/494
Topics

How are you using AI with your team at Rochester

How are you using AI with your team at MIT

What are the AI policies at your institutions

On the ingestion side how do you manage consumption

Tips and tricks to incorporate AI into your work

Can you talk more about using AI to distribute content
outside the web

Do you have tips for managers

How have you seen EDUs using AI other than as assistive
technology

What are your favorite tools

Have you done adversarial testing

How does AI in Drupal impact EDU

Where do you see AI in EDU in the future

Resources

Crawler rate limit

Externalizing costs

AI for U

MidCamp 2024 session about YaleSites

Tools

Element 451

Builder io

Deque Axe Devtools

Descript

Opus clips

Kapwing

HeyGen

Synthesia

Text to video

Sora

Veo





Guests

Brian Piper - brianwpiper.com
Mike Miles - Mike-miles.com mikemiles86
Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Andrew Berry - lullabot.com deviantintegral
MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu


Brief description:

Have you ever wanted to connect your Drupal website to an
external data source, to include their datasets into the
presentation of your Drupal-managed content? There’s a module
for that



Module name/project name:

External Entities



Brief history

How old: created in May 2015 by attiks, though the most
recent release is by Colan Schwartz (colan), a fellow
Canadian

Versions available: 8.x-2.0-beta1 and 3.0.0-beta4, the
latter of which supports Drupal 10 and 11



Maintainership

Actively maintained, latest release was less than a month
ago

Security coverage (though technically needs a stable
release

Test coverage

Documentation: user guide

Number of open issues: 77 open issues, 3 of which are
bugs against the 3.x branch, though one is marked fixed now



Usage stats:

679 sites



Module features and usage

The External Entities module lets you map fields from
external data sources to fields on a “virtual” entity in
Drupal. This allows for external data to be used with
Drupal’s powerful features like Views, Entity Queries, or
Search API as well as use your local Drupal site’s theme to
theme data from an external source

The module does provide a time-based caching layer for
external entities, but you can also implement a more custom
cache expiration logic through custom code

External entities can also have annotations, essentially
Drupal-managed information that will be associated with the
external entity, and accessed as a normal field through all
Drupal field operations. This could allow you to have
Drupal-based comments on information from a different
website, for example

There is a sizeable ecosystem of companion modules, to
help you connect to different kinds of external storage, as
to help you aggregate data from multiple sources

In my Drupal career I’ve worked on a number of higher ed
websites, and the ability to display externally-managed data
is a pretty common requirement, either from an HRIS system to
show staff and faculty data, or a courseware solution like
Banner. I thought this would be an interesting tangent to
today’s topic