Vimal Joseph

A walkthrough of the behind-the-scenes tasks executed (with code examples and the tools we used in this exercise) to generate the preliminary dataset for analyzing Drupal usage among the top 300 universities. This blog covers everything from selecting the university ranking to generating a CSV file with the universities and their Drupal usage.

A statistic on drupal.org states that 71% of the top 100 universities use Drupal, but the page lacks precise data or references to support this claim. Given that the education sector is one of Drupal's largest adopters, we at TheDropTimes have embarked on a project to validate and substantiate this claim with proper evidence. This initiative was suggested by Kevin Reynen (University of Colorado). While attending a Higher Education Conference, he noted the frequent citation of this statistic and its lack of supporting data. He proposed a broader definition of Drupal usage in universities, encompassing not just their homepages but any of their websites. Prompted by Reynen's observations, TheDropTimes began a project to collect data on the top 300 global universities, as ranked by QS, focusing on their use of Drupal.