Register Now! Open Apereo 2020 at U Michigan

"The Open Source Conference for Education"
June 15-19, 2020 | University of Michigan | Ann Arbor, MI

We're excited to announce that the full conference program for Open Apereo 2020 is now available! Topics include open-source software in higher education, teaching and learning, assessment, development, and much more.

There are several new elements to our conference this year:

• Apereo Day: An opportunity to get an overview of Apereo Software Communities and hear news and future plans.

• Design Challenge Day: A fun, collaborative day focused on discussing and designing solutions to identified teaching and learning challenges.

• Community Contributions: A day and a half of real-world institutional success stories - using open source software to solve today’s challenges.

• HAXCamp: An opportunity for the web component community to meet and build together.

• Hypothesis AnnotatED Meetup: Explore the open-source annotation software, Hypothesis, and share research and experiences with academic attendees.

Our event kicks off with a keynote by Kathleen Fitzpatrick. Kathleen is Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University as well as the author of Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Johns Hopkins, 2019). In her talk, "Collaborative Software Communities: Sustainability, Solidarity, and the Common Good," Dr. Fitzpatrick will discuss the future and need for academy-owned infrastructure as well as the social connections and commitments that underwrite the work necessary to keep collective, not-for-profit forms of scholarly infrastructure running.

We'll also learn from two academic centers from the University of Michigan: the Academic Innovation Center and the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching. These groups will share their innovative approaches to teaching and learning and offer examples from each center.

We will have a chance to hear and learn from fellow community members as they present their experiences and outcomes using Apereo software in Higher Education. These presentations will lead to a great learning experience for all attendees.  

Don't forget to register now to take advantage of early-bird pricing. The deadline is May 8, 2020!

• Conference Program 

• Hotel Registration

• Conference Registration

THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS!

This conference would not be possible if it wasn't for our sponsors. We would like to thank our platinum sponsor, Longsight, and our two gold sponsors, Entornos de Formación and Learning Experiences. We appreciate your contribution to this year's conference. Sponsorship opportunities are still available! Please share this link with anyone you know that may be interested in supporting Open Apereo 2020.

With many opportunities to learn and collaborate at the conference, we look forward to seeing you there!

Sincerely,

Ian Dolphin, Executive Director, Apereo Foundation
Alan Regan, Open Apereo 2020 Conference Committee Chair
Martin Ramsay, Open Apereo 2020 Conference Committee Vice Chair
Jennifer Cummings, Open Apereo 2020 Conference Coordinator

http://conference.apereo.org

For general inquiries about this year’s conference, please contact apereocoordinator@concentra-cms.com

Johns Hopkins University: An Open Cities Platform Partnership

One of the three pillars articulated in the Johns Hopkins University's (JHU) strategic framework, Ten by Twenty vision is Commitment to Community. This pillar includes a commitment to enhance the University's ties to the city of Baltimore. In support of this commitment, a JHU Computer Science course, Software for Resilient Communities, paired student groups with community partners to develop software to solve real-world problems for these partners, with the intent of having these solutions continue after the end of the course.

One group worked with the St Francis Community Center to develop a portal which would assist community members and staff in organizing activities to serve the community.

They selected the open source Lutece platform, which has been developed by the City of Paris to provide a range of digital services for its citizens as part of its open cities program. Functionality for scheduling rooms and events was provided by an existing Lutece plugin. Additional functionality for allowing community members to volunteer for any of a list of activities was added by the student team. Students worked with community center staff to develop an attractive skin and develop content for the platform. The core Lutece team in Paris assisted in the student plugin development.

In order to achieve the goal of sustaining the project after the end of the course, the Digital Research and Curation Center (DRCC) in the Sheridan Libraries at JHU has adopted the project under the auspices of its open source programs office. Software engineers and system administrators have worked to enhance features and structure the software so that it can be more easily managed in a production environment.

The core Lutece team in Paris continues to be helpful in the ongoing development work. A demonstration instance has been set up for the benefit of the St Francis staff for their evaluation. The DRCC will continue to work with St Francis to ensure that their requirements are fully addressed, and plans to deploy a production instance open to the community when this work is complete.

https://president.jhu.edu/10x2020/
http://www.dsn.jhu.edu/courses/cs310/
https://dev.lutece.paris.fr/

100 Attend Seventh ESUP Days/Apereo Paris

Jointly organized by the ESUP-Portail Consortium and the Apereo Foundation, the seventh edition of the ESUP-Days/Apereo Paris event took place on February 4th, 2020 at the Université de Paris.

One hundred people attended the conference and more than 50 people simultaneously watched the live stream throughout the day. 

This year's program included sessions about Opencast Studio, Karuta, OAE, Learning Analytics. Ian Dolphin, ED of the Foundation, also gave a keynote on cooperative open source software and how it can help face today's challenges like data privacy & ownership.

The full-English version of the recorded sessions will soon be available: we will keep you posted when they are available.

#esupdays29 #apereoparis20

Apereo Africa: May 5-7, 2020 in Johannesburg, South Africa

Open Equella Briefing

Mark Your Calendars!
Unicon would like to invite you to join us for the next Unicon openEQUELLA briefing. We will be discussing community news, highlights and updates on openEQUELLA. We will also share details about development activities the Unicon openEQUELLA team has been working on through the Open Source Support program.

More information, including how to join, will be available soon on our event page. If for some reason you cannot join us, we'll post links to the recording and slide deck on the Blog page.

Date: Thursday, April 9, 2020
Time: 9am PDT, 10am MDT, 11am CDT, 12pm EDT
Webinar Information: https://unicon.zoom.us/j/744823899 

Unicon openEQUELLA Open Source Support Team

Fiosan: Notifications at the University of Edinburgh

About Fiosan

Fiosan aims to transform task-related communications within higher education institutions. It provides a cross-system solution for personalized notifications and emergency communications, enabling notifications to be created by and consumed across multiple services and communication channels.  

Fiosan was formerly known as the Notifications Backbone. It was initially developed at the University of Edinburgh, and is currently an Apereo Incubating project.

Fiosan at the University of Edinburgh
Fiosan has been in use at  the University of Edinburgh for over a year. Use is steadily increasing and includes: 

• Exams: integration with the university’s exam scheduling system, providing students with notifications for each exam they are scheduled to sit.

• Student surveys and questionnaires: personalised, call-to-action notifications for each questionnaire or survey a student must complete.

• Fees: alerts for students who have outstanding fees to pay.

• New students: daily call-to-action notifications for new students who have key tasks to complete.

• Major incidents: personalised alerts for students affected by major IT incidents or outages.

Students receive notifications via the University’s uPortal-based web portal.

Find out more

If you would like to know more about Fiosan, or are interested in getting involved, please get in touch. 

-- Mary Elder, Portal Services Service Manager, University of Edinburgh, mary.elder@ed.ac.uk

Apereo Board Minutes