Open Apereo 2015: New Initiatives & Proven Software

Dear Colleague,

With slightly less than a month before Open Apereo 2015, I thought I would draw your attention to some of the highlights of the program of this year's event. Open Apereo 2015 will see activity reports and new initiatives by longstanding software communities such as Sakai, uPortal, CAS, the Open Academic Environment and Bedework. Come and learn about responsive design in Sakai and uPortal. and the hundreds of new Open Academic Environment tenants as part of the *Unity service.

Open Apereo 2015 will also offer the opportunity to engage with some of our newer communities and initiatives, including the next-generation Karuta e-portfolio project, the Apereo Learning Analytics Initiative - which is making great strides to define and implement an open architecture for learning analytics - and EdExchange, a standard data exchange project for higher education supported by PESC.

Since it was formed two and a half years ago, Apereo has been joined by a number of communities which saw the benefit of sharing an open, common organizational umbrella. Xerte, originally from the University of Nottingham in the UK, offers an environment for authoring learning resources which are both interactive and accessible to students with disabilities. Opencast is emerging as a platform for academic media capture and management which is capable of operating at very significant scale. UniTime, initiated by Purdue, is an open source course scheduling/timetabling solution.

Other program highlights include -

Standards and Specifications

Building Applications using IMS Learning Tools Interoperability - Dr Chuck Severance

IMS Caliper: A Learning Analytics Specification for Higher Education - Anthony Whyte

Learning Analytics

Getting started with Apereo Learning Analytics - Gary Gilbert

Apereo Learning Analytics Community update - Josh Baron

Open Learning Analytics and Sakai at Uniformed Services University - Eric Hanson

Media

Why do students use recorded lectures? - Stephen Marquard

Keynotes and general sessions

David Wiley on Open Education Infrastructure

Patrick Masson on the Real Meaning of Open

Bob Squillace and Lucy Appert on the Digital Humanities - next challenge for campus IT?

In addition, we have a packed schedule of social and networking events, Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award winners, and much more. Check out our conference site at: http://conference.apereo.org/

or the full program in Lanyrd at: http://lanyrd.com/2015/apereo/schedule/

Early bird registration has been extended until Friday 8th May. See you in Baltimore!

Regards,
Ian