My understanding is that one can enter a URL for a public website/page.  It is, however, untested, and untestable. The "shell" interface is not there to make this useful yet because there is nowhere currently that any user can view a list of departments.  Initially, Sloan and OF discussed creating an outer shell for non-.LRN users for viewing public, rather than private or confidential data, such as these department URLs, course syllabi, group descriptions (maybe), etc., but it is not yet implemented.

Let me see if I understand this correctly:

The "external URL" field is a hook that is meant to allow you to link from some currently non-existent user-accessible list of departments in dotLRN to the individual home pages of those departments. Another way to put this is it lets you associate a particular dotLRN group (in this case, groups of the type called "department") with (possibly static) web pages.

I can see this being as important on the course level as it is on the department level. Plenty of professors already create their own web sites for their courses and it's not clear to me that dotLRN completely replaces the need for that in all cases.

Likewise, I can see a similar need when adapting dotLRN for different purposes. For example, my company intends to use dotLRN as a project portal, where each "class" becomes a "project." In most cases, these projects are self-paced online learning courses, i.e., they are structured web sites. It would be very helpful to have a mechanism that creates a (possibly static) web directory where we can drop in the courses we create and make them easily accessible to the members of the project group.

How much functionality is currently behind the "external URL" hook and what would need to be done in order to extend it?