Organic groups is an important feature in drupal, especially in educational contexts. Organic Groups can be groups of students learning and collaborating together. Organic Groups can also be complete courses in a program of study. If this courses are taught as distance learning or online learning, they usually contains learning documents and therefore re-usability is an important demand. The possibility of cloning or coping groups with its content is very important to use Drupal as a learning management system.

Regrettably cloning nodes is not an easy task in drupal. Many content types, in particular those providing a functionality, are implemented in modules and depends on special data structures or external resources. Cloning a book or a forum makes less sense without cloning its subpages or contributions.

Nevertheless there are two modules providing an sophisticated framework for cloning content in drupal. Node Clone is the basic module. It can theoretically copy any node type as a single node without its relations to other nodes. Practically it is necessary to test this module with a particular node type and perhaps adapt it. This module does not include attachments or comments. Book Copy is build on Node Copy and offers the possibility to clone entire books. It calls Node Clone for every book page and reconstructs the dependencies afterwards.

For cloning groups with its content it seems as if these two modules are a valuable effort. An other module alike Book Copy is necessary to call Node Clone for a group node and Node Clone resp. Book Copy for every content node and finally reconstruct its relations. Because often learning materials contains downloadable files, including attachments in the clone process would be generally a good cause.

Actually we have written a prototype of the OG Clone module and therefore can attest that this concept works so far. The intension is to create a learning management system based on drupal and to offer online courses with drupal.