[Announcements] Apereo Newsletter May 15, 2013

Thu May 16 14:34:18 PDT 2013

Apereo Newsletter

May 15, 2013

Announcements

1.  From the Executive Director

2.  Marist College to Help Lead Sakai OAE Initiative

3.  Winners of the Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award for 2013

Projects

4.  OAE Progress Report

Community

5.  Linking to External Tools from a VLE/LMS

6.  Recommendations from WebLearn Student Experience

7.  ComputerWorld Article Mentions uPortal and CAS

8.  Webinar -- Unicon Updates Open Source Support Service

9.  Events

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Announcements

1.  From the Executive Director

Welcome to the first Apereo newsletter. Over the next few months we'll be
strengthening internal and external communications. This shouldn't and
won't be a one-to-many process -- your contributions are vital. Please
consider submitting news of interest to the community.

One of the most important legacies of Jasig is the incubation process it
developed, which Apereo inherited. One of our early objectives is to
subject that process to broad community review, and refresh it to meet
changed circumstances. To that end, a working group of volunteers has
constructed a community survey, and are currently engaged in a series of
interviews to elicit perspectives on how the process might be improved.
Incubation -- the process of nurturing and mentoring new projects to
sustainability -- is a vital part of the software and community lifecycle.
It is also essential for the future of Apereo. If you would like to know
more about the incubation review, visit
http://www.apereo.org/incubation   …and don't forget to complete the survey!

Regional events are particularly important in establishing Apereo as a
relevant global organisation. I recently attended the second Sakai Mexico
event, which was held in Puebla in April. The event had a great range of
speakers -- it was especially good to share a platform again with Joseph
Hardin, the Sakai Project PI and first Foundation Board Chair, and Chuck
Severance, a former Sakai Executive Director. My thanks to U-Red, an Apereo
Commercial Affiliate in Mexico, for taking the lead in organising the
event. For streams of the event, go to
http://www.u-red.com.mx/sakaimexico2013/program.html .

Whilst the Sakai Mexico event was organised as a Sakai event -- and planned
before the merger of Jasig and Sakai -- it was interesting to note growing
interest in the long-established former Jasig projects: uPortal and CAS,
and newer initiatives such as the Student Success Plan Project. As we look
towards future regional events, we'll factor stronger representation for
these software communities into the program mix.

Last year Sakai and Jasig signed a practically-focused memorandum of
understanding with a consortium of 72 universities active in producing and
localising open source software in France.  Our close relationship with
that consortium -- ESUP -- is bearing early fruit. ESUP institutions are
now collaborating closely in the uMobile initiative. ESUP colleagues were
also instrumental in establishing a French Ministry of Higher Education and
Research project to trial the Sakai CLE as a MOOC platform in France. There
will be early news from this project and other MOOC trials at HEC Montreal
and Universiteit van Amsterdam at Open Apereo 2013 in June.

Conference Information: Open Apereo 2013

I realise you'll have been a little bombarded by conference information,
but don't forget to book your place at Open Apereo 2013 2nd-6th June, in
San Diego. The program has an exciting range of speakers, including
keynotes from Theresa Rowe, CIO of Oakland University, and Marilyn
McMillan, CIO of NYU. There will be many opportunities to network with
fellow community members, and both learn from and contribute effective
practice. Program, registration details and other information can be found
at http://conf2013.apereo.org/

Ian Dolphin
Executive Director, Apereo Foundation
ian.dolphin at apereo.org

Twitter: iandolphin24

2.  Marist College to Help with Sakai OAE

The Apereo Foundation has announced that Marist College will formally join
the Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE) initiative to provide leadership
and resources for initial pilots as well as further development of the OAE
platform.  Marist will be coming together with the University of Cambridge
(UK) and Georgia Tech, current project partners, to help realize OAE's
compelling vision for the future of academic collaboration.

"The University of Cambridge is delighted to be working with Marist on this
groundbreaking project," said John Norman, Director for Cambridge's Centre
for Applied Research in Educational Technologies, "We have always respected
Marist's vision and openness in their approach to technology for higher
education and will greatly value their contributions to the project."

Marist's involvement in the Sakai OAE project connects with its larger
strategic goal of advancing its leadership in the use of information
technology to support teaching, learning and scholarship.

"Marist has played a leadership role within the Sakai community for many
years," said Marist College President, Dr. Dennis Murray, "We are excited
about the ways in which OAE can open up our academic community to the
world, and thereby enrich our students' learning experiences while also
benefiting our larger global society."

Marist College will be providing financial support to the project as well
as dedicating staff and student employee time for Quality Assurance
testing, something that Marist has done for the Sakai Collaboration and
Learning Environment (CLE) for many years. They will also be participating
in several pioneering pilots, both locally at Marist, as well as an
inter-institutional pilot that will leverage OAE's unique "permeability,"
allowing participants at all three institutions to collaborate across
separate OAE instances or "tenants."

"The ability for users to control whether content and interactions are
shared with just their group, the entire institution, across institutions
or even with the world is extremely powerful from a community building and
collaboration perspective," said Josh Baron, Senior Academic Technology
Officer and Pro-Tem chair of the Apereo Foundation Board of Directors,
whose office has been piloting Sakai OAE with faculty for the past semester.

In addition to participating in this inter-institutional pilot, Marist will
also be leveraging the unique capabilities of Sakai OAE to support a new
initiative called the Academic Community Cloud or ACC. The initiative's
goal is to "go beyond MOOCs" by opening up the Marist academic community,
not just its courses, to the world, thus allowing the public to connect and
collaborate with Marist as means to create new knowledge.

"As a center of excellence at Marist College, the Enterprise Computing
Community (ECC) will be among the first groups to pilot Sakai OAE as part
of the Academic Community Cloud initiative", said Dr. Roger Norton, Dean of
the Marist School of Computer Science and Mathematics, "with the goal of
helping our community connect with those interested in enterprise
computing."

3.  Winners of the Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award for 2013

The Apereo Foundation is pleased to announce the winners of the Teaching
with Sakai Innovation Award (TWSIA) for 2013.

They are:

- Introduction to Communication Science from the University of Amsterdam
(Fully-online course)
Arie Den Boon (Visiting Professor, Communication Science)
Category: Higher Education: Fully Online and Hybrid Courses

- Advanced Research Design from the University of Cape Town
(Hybrid course)
Cheryl Brown and Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams (Lecturers, Centre for
Educational Technology)
Category: Higher Education: Fully Online and Hybrid Courses

- Project Software Engineering, BSc Computer Science from the University of
Amsterdam
(Other Uses of Sakai)
Alan Berg (Educational Consultant, Center of Information Technology), Tim
Bloeme, Hans Dekkers.
Category:  Project Sites and Other Uses of Sakai
The intent of the award is to highlight examples of educational
applications of Sakai that fall into an innovative or transformative
category.

Each of the winners will be recognized for their use of Sakai for teaching
and learning at the Apereo (formerly Sakai-Jasig) Conference in San Diego,
California, June 3-6, 2013. Details of their winning projects will be
shared at the conference. For information about attending or viewing the
proceedings, click the Apereo conference link, http://conf2013.apereo.org/ .

Entries were received from schools and universities in the U.S. and from
South Africa, the Netherlands, India, and England.

The Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award (TWSIA) is a project of the Sakai
Teaching and Learning Community.  This is the 6th year of the competition.

We thank our sponsor Asahi Net for their support of the Teaching with Sakai
Innovation Award.

Ian Dolphin
Executive Director, Apereo Foundation
ian.dolphin at apereo.org

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Projects

4.  OAE Progress Report

The fourth OAE progress update report can be found at [1], summarising the
progress that has been made since the middle of January. It describes the
architectural, feature, testing and production-related work that has been
done on the way towards an initial OAE release, which is due in July 2013.
Piloting will take place at Cambridge University, Georgia Tech and Marist
College, and this report describes the scope and focus of this release and
pilot.

[1]
https://oae-community.sakaiproject.org/content#p=pYK6vy0eie/April%20Progress%20Report.pdf

Kind regards,

Nicolaas Matthijs
nicolaas.matthijs at caret.cam.ac.uk

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Community

5.  Linking to External Tools from a VLE/LMS

This entry by Adam Marshall in his WebLearn blog discusses linking to
external tools from a VLE/LMS: IMS LTI, oAuth or Webauth, or any other
web-based Single Sign-On.  WebLearn (Sakai at Oxford) offers a number of
technologies for people wanting to interoperate with external tools and
services. This blog post attempts to explain each option and then make a
suggestion as to which one should be used.

https://blogs.it.ox.ac.uk/adamweblearn/2013/04/linking-to-external-tools-from-a-vlelms-ims-lti-oauth-or-webauth-or-any-other-web-based-single-sign-on/

Adam Marshall
adam.marshall at it.ox.ac.uk

6.  Recommendations from WebLearn Student Experience

This entry in the WebLearn blog includes recommendations from the Student
Digital Experience (DIGE) project, a small project that was run in late
2012 to study how students currently use WebLearn in support of their
learning. (WebLearn is Oxford University's Sakai instance.) The
investigators focused on gathering information about student behaviour in
finding, navigating and interacting with their current WebLearn areas.  The
report is adapted from the project report by Fawei Geng, Joanna Wild and
Jill Fresen.

https://blogs.it.ox.ac.uk/adamweblearn/2013/03/recommendations-from-weblearn-student-experience-project/

7.  ComputerWorld Article Mentions uPortal and CAS

Read an article in ComputerWorld with an interview of James Webb from West
Texas A&M and comments about uPortal and CAS.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9238878/Sizing_up_open_source_Not_so_simple

8.  Webinar -- Unicon Updates Open Source Support Service

Wednesday, May 22, 2 p.m. EST (11 a.m. PST) GMT -5

Enterprise open source projects require support to help institutions and
organizations reap all of their advantages -- increased control, variety of
choices, and reduced cost. In this webinar, learn about Unicon's updated
commercial support service, Open Source Support. The service offers
enterprise-level support at various SLAs to meet the needs of deployments
of any size. This webinar will feature an overview of the updated program,
highlighting how Unicon's team of open source experts can provide superior
support for open source projects. Visit
http://www.unicon.net/support-webinar to register.

Lisa Di Pietro
ldipietro at unicon.net

9. Events

Open Apereo 2013 - 2013
June 3 - 6, 2013
San Diego, California
http://conf2013.apereo.org/
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