Apereo Foundation's Higher Education Open Source Success Stories
Higher Education Open Source Success Stories
Sakai at the National Autonomous University of Mexico
When UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico had to deliver interdisciplinary training in experimental science for the COSDAC, SEP (Ministry of Public Education), it turned to Sakai. 120 hours, 4750 serving teachers, 105 course tutors, and 24 course creators across 32 Mexican states later, the project was a resounding success. And no per-user license fees.
Opencast and SWITCH
When the Swiss National Research and Education Network SWITCH were looking for a robust and open video management platform, they chose Opencast. SWITCH offer services to a range of education and research customers with high expectations of service quality. SWITCH decided to improve the already robust Opencast software with a community initiative. Quality Booster brought together nine institutions in the Opencast community to book almost 500 hours of additional quality assurance to the Opencast release process. The entire community of Opencast adopters gained from the SWITCH initiative.
Xerte – Content Creation for All
The Xerte community builds free content creation tools for all author skill levels. The software is designed around a core belief that simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible. When you deploy Xerte, you can engage all the content creators you need to. Compelling new approaches to teaching and learning - free software to support them.
UNC Chapel Hill Onboards Freshman Language Learners With Sakai
Foreign language placement exams were becoming a costly and cumbersome-to-manage burden for UNC-Chapel Hill - so they turned to Sakai. Sakai's flexibility and freedom from licensing costs provided a one-stop way to onboard incoming freshmen and transfer students, and dramatically reduce cost and effort.
UniTime and Masaryk University
When Masaryk University wanted to improve instructor schedule quality, they turned to UniTime, the comprehensive open source scheduling solution. UniTime's constraint-based solver allowed them to control hours per day, breaks, gaps in schedule, classes taught in a row, and more. UniTime - controlling schedules, controlling costs.
St. Petersburg College and Student Success Plan
Like all educational institutions, St. Petersburg College in Florida has the goal of enhancing student retention, increasing student success, and improving students’ ability to graduate on time.
To support these goals, SPC needed technology that would help them record information about students and to tracking, identifying and resolving problems quickly – preferably before they were encountered. After reviewing their options, SPC adopted Apereo Student Success Plan (SSP).
The Juilliard School: Identity and Access Management with CAS
When the Juilliard School needed to securely connect its constituents to both local and cloud applications, it decided on open source Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions as the answer. With open source IAM solutions, programmers can review and validate the code, and users can collaborate and know that the information they are sharing will be delivered correctly and securely, to the appropriate group(s). Based on this conclusion, the Juilliard School chose to adopt Apereo Central Authentication Service (CAS) as its IAM solution.
Xerte at the University of Cape Town
When the University of Cape Town Library needed a tool to create content for their MOOC, they chose Xerte. Xerte's "author once, run anywhere" paradigm allowed them to author content independent of their MOOC - and retain and curate it independently.
Timetabling and Scheduling with UniTime
UniTime is a comprehensive scheduling/timetabling solution made by higher education, for higher education. UniTime is freely available under an open source license. Your institution can deploy with community-based support, or with for-fee professional services. Your institutional choice, to suit your institutional circumstances.
The Juilliard School and CAS: Deployment Choices
After choosing CAS, the Juilliard School enlisted Unicon to assist with integrating CAS, Shibboleth, and Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) with Microsoft Office 365, an application hosted in the cloud. Unicon also configured, installed, and branded CAS and assisted Juilliard with local single sign-on integrations that linked together Juilliard’s instances of Web Advisor, Drupal, and Atomic Learning.
Columbia University Single Sign On: From Home-grown to Community
Apereo. It’s about community.
For almost ten years, Columbia University had been running a home-grown web single sign-on (webSSO) system called WIND, and integrating it with a variety of on-campus applications. When Columbia decided to adopt Google Apps they considered the effort required to extend WIND again, and decided it was time to consider a more standards-based approach. Columbia was attracted by the promise of less development, and faster deployment. They chose the Apereo Foundation Central Authentication Service (CAS), an open source WebSSO application that provides authentication for local and cloud-based applications.
Northeast Ohio Medical University - Sakai
When Northeast Ohio Medical University needed to provide targeted formal guidance for year three medical students, they turned to Sakai. Using Sakai's rich timed announcements, reminders and conditional release features, students were guided to rich, interactive content authored in Sakai's Lessons tool. Busy students on an eight week rotation into hospitals were better prepared - thanks to Sakai.
UniTime and the Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University
When the Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University was faced with building renovation, the old manual timetabling process was no longer sufficient. "This class has always been in this room on Monday morning" and "this professor likes this room" just wasn't going to cut it. They adopted and adapted UniTime, and schedules were published eight weeks after adoption.
Xerte at the University of Nottingham
Xerte makes it easy to create rich, interactive learning content as part of a team. At the University of Nottingham learning technologists, media specialists, software developers and teachers use Xerte's collaborative workflow to create pedagogically sound, rich interactive learning content - playable anywhere.
uPortal at the California Community College System
Like most colleges, the California Community Colleges (CCC) wanted to implement a portal for their students that would simplify access to important information and services. It would be designed to increase student understanding of the importance of education planning, activities, and campus-based resources that can help keep them stay on track to complete their educational and career goals. CCC chose to develop their “MyPath” Student Portal using Apereo uPortal, a scalable solution that supports multi-tenancy, responsive design, and integration with an identity provider. Apereo community software updates and existing services helps CCC reduce costs and save funding - funding that can then go towards innovation and support of students.
Kyoto University Compliance Training with Sakai
When Kyoto University needed to provide compliance training programs for faculty staff and researchers it turned to Sakai. Sakai's flexibility meant Kyoto could readily provide bespoke training programs at a departmental level or the whole institution.
Xerte and Accessibility
Accessibility is a key strength of Xerte. From the outset, the Xerte community has worked with accessibility specialists to collaboratively create inclusive and accessible tools and content. Authoring content for all our learners.
University of Dayton Extends LMS with Tsugi
In response to faculty demand, the University of Dayton was looking for a way to quickly develop and integrate niche tools to extend Sakai functionality. It turned to Tsugi. With the help of Tsugi, Dayton designs and develops tailor-made tools to the exact specifications of faculty members in a fraction of the time it took previously. Tsugi tools created so far have given faculty the ability use in-video quizzing, group feedback rubrics, photo sharing and commenting, and course learning journals. Tsugi has led to increased levels of faculty engagement and innovation at Dayton.
Uniformed Health Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda Improves Test and Question re-use with Sakai
When the Uniformed Health Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland wanted to improve test and question re-use, they turned to Sakai and Apereo Commercial Partner Unicon. The goal was to make cataloging, searching, and re-using questions and question banks easier for instructors. Working in partnership, USU and Unicon developed new question tagging and search capabilities and shared them back to the Sakai community.
UniTime: Open Source, Open Algorithms, Open Innovation
Many universities contribute to UniTime, producing their own features and adaptations that are played back into the software for the general good. All UniTime code is available in GitHub, and UniTime's algorithms have been widely published in research papers and conference proceedings. Open source. Open algorithms. Open Innovation.
Apereo Values Document: Section 4. The Value of Apereo