January 2017 Apereo Newsletter

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Lucy Appert

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Jan 29, 2017, 2:14:48 PM1/29/17
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Apereo Newsletter
January 2017

From the Editor
Announcements 
1) The New Apereo Individual Membership Offering
2) Submissions for ATLAS 2017 Teaching Awards Open Jan. 15, 2017- March 20, 2017
3) Apereo Lightning Talks Recording Available
4) Calling All Sakai Wiki Users!

Upcoming Events
5) ESUP-Days #23/Apereo Paris 2017 conference January 31, 2017
6) OER17 Conference Registration Now Open
7) Apereo Opencast Summit 2017 & Spanish Apereo User Group March 1-3, 2017, Valencia, Spain
8) Opencast Workshop: Migrating from v 1.6 to v 2.3, February 8-9, 2017, Cologne, Germany

Project News & Releases
9) Update on the Image Quiz Project 
10) Opencast Releases New Major Version 2.3
11) "Student Pulse" Visualizations for Learning Analytics Open Dashboard
12) uPortal Accessibility Audit and Remediation

Case Studies
13) Case Study: MyUW at University of Wisconsin
14) Case Study: Apereo Open LRS at Notre Dame
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From the Editor: 
The Apereo newsletter provides an important opportunity for communicating within and across the many projects in our community. This is your vehicle to share what you're doing and invite others to join. Our newsletter is also an important place for sharing strategies and success stories for pursuing an open source philosophy in educational technology.

We are looking for contributions of all kinds -- examples might include (but are not limited to) articles, video clips, screencasts, graphics, or short announcements on:
-- How you’re using software produced by an Apereo community at your institution
-- Major releases or minor tweaks
-- Ideas for new projects you’d like to get feedback on or gauge interest in
-- Important discussions of general educational technology issues that emerge on community email lists

Contributions of all lengths, from snippet to think pieces, are welcome. 

NOTE: We are especially looking for Case Studies of any length for our next issue. Have you undertaken an upgrade, implementation, feature rollout, or redesign? Tell us about what you did and what you learned! 

The next submission deadline, for the February Newsletter, will be February 26. 
-- Lucy Appert, Newsletter Editor  
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Announcements 
1) The New Apereo Individual Membership Offering
For almost a decade and a half, the Apereo Foundation and its predecessors have been at the forefront of creating and sustaining software in the service of higher education.

We've accomplished that by creating innovative and functional open source software collaboratively – made by education, for education. And we've had the help of many, many, talented and committed individuals in that work.

Apereo and its predecessors have always sought to recognize that talent and commitment through a series of programs. These programs – such as the fellows program and teaching innovation awards – have both celebrated commitment and success, and helped take those successes to the next level by providing small amounts of funding to facilitate networking good practice and further development.

As the Apereo family of software and related communities grows larger, we'd like to support and extend those recognition programs with a new membership category – individual membership. This doesn't mean that Apereo is changing its primary focus on supporting higher education institutions and serving the academic mission, but it does mean we're finding new ways to involve, enlarge, and engage our community in doing just that. 

By making a small (deductible) contribution that will be dedicated to our support programs, individual members can help make a difference. In return, we'll help you stay in touch by providing discounted access to Open Apereo, our main annual conference, and give you a say in how Apereo is run by voting for a reserved individual member board seat.

Apereo's work has touched countless learners and faculty worldwide, helping to both extend access to learning opportunities, and to enrich them. Help us sustain and extend that by becoming an individual member of the Apereo Foundation today. if you have a friend or colleague who might not have seen this message, please pass it on.
-- Ian Dolphin, Executive Director
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2) Submissions for ATLAS 2017 Teaching Awards Open Jan. 15, 2017- March 20, 2017
The Apereo Teaching and Learning community is seeking submissions for the annual Apereo Teaching and Learning Awards (formerly TWSIA) competition. The award recognizes innovation and excellence in the use of digital technologies to enhance teaching, academic collaboration, and student engagement and learning. 

This year, the award applicant selection process opens on January 15, 2017 and closes on March 20, 2017. During this time period, applications will be accepted at the ATLAS page in Apereo.org (https://www.apereo.org/communities/atlas ). Additional information on the award (mission statement, a definition of innovation, criteria, rubrics, and previous winners) will be also available on the site.

The Awards Committee welcomes a broader audience in the Apereo open source education community. We invite submissions that demonstrate innovative teaching and learning using not only Sakai, OAE, and Karuta, but also Xerte and Opencast. Based on merit, we hope to select up to six winners across the award categories. 
Click below to have a glanc at the ATLAS rubrics: 
Winners will be announced in early April 2017 and recognized at the Open Apereo Conference on June 4-8, 2017, in Philadelphia, PA, US.  

For further inquires, please email Luisa Li (luis...@apereo.org) or Cheryl Brown ( cheryl...@uct.ac.za) 
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3) Apereo Lightning Talks Recording Available
The Apereo Lightning Talks recording is available now at https://youtu.be/eEKZZTt6QAs . 
There are six five-minute talks on a variety of Apereo topics including:
  • The Apereo Image Quiz project
  • Sakai enhancement - Posting Assignments based on Course start date
  • Documentation suggestion - using Github Pages for project websites
  • Sakai enhancement - making Sakai's skin easier to configure and use
  • Sakai enhancement - next steps for Lessons
  • Sakai login - new technology to log in on mobile device without username and password

The Apereo Lightning talks are sponsored by the Apereo FARM group - http://farm.apereo.org
-- Neal Caidin
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4) Calling All Sakai Wiki Tool Users!
UX design students Anarag Goyal and Lesha Patel from IUPUI would like to interview a few of our Sakai community members about the use of the Wiki tool as part of their capstone project, which involves creating a plan to modernize or replace the current Sakai Wiki tool. Ideally, they would like to recruit three or four faculty as well as a couple of students to interview about usability, expectations, and desired features for the Wiki. 

If you use or have an interest in the Sakai Wiki and are willing to do a brief interview within the next week or two, please contact Wilma Hodges at wi...@longsight.com .
-- Wilma Hodges
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Upcoming Events

5) ESUP-Days #23/Apereo Paris 2017 Conference January 31, 2017
The ESUP-Portail Consortium (https://www.esup-portail.org/ ) and the Apereo Foundation are pleased to invite you to the fourth edition of the ESUP-Days/Apereo Paris event. This joint conference will take place at the Université Paris Descartes (Paris, FRANCE) on January 31, 2017 (https://www.esup-portail.org/conference/index-EN.html#accommodations ).

Admission for the event is entirely free. Please note that only registered participants will be able to access the conference room, so don't forget to register online beforehand: https://www.esup-portail.org/registration/index.jsp .

Be sure to check out the full program (available at: https://www.esup-portail.org/conference/index-EN.html#program ) to discover what's in store for you. As you can see, the agenda is quite intense with sessions covering a lot of topics and projects, including uPortal, CAS, OAE, Karuta, Learning Analytics, etc. 

Amongst the special guests will be Jim Helwig (Chair of the uPortal Steering Committee), Misagh Moayyed (CAS project chairman), Jacques Raynauld (Director of the Department of Applied Economics at HEC Montréal), etc.

Visit our website for more information on the conference (location, accommodations, etc.): https://www.esup-portail.org/conference/index-EN.html

We hope to see you soon in the City of Lights!
ESUP-Days #23/Apereo Paris 2017 | January 31, 2017 | Paris (France)
@ApereoOrg | @EsupPortail
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6) OER17 Conference Registration Now Open
Attending OER17 presents a valuable opportunity for anyone with an interest in open educational practice, expert or novice, to share, learn, and debate ‘The Politics of Open’ and consider what needs to be done to overcome barriers and move open education forwards. The programme will consist of two action-packed days with a choice of strands and sessions as well as keynotes from Maha Bali, Lucy Crompton-Reid, and Diana Arce.

Our early bird rate is available until 31 January. 
More information: http://go.alt.ac.uk/2iMluC1
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7) Apereo Opencast Summit 2017 & Spanish Apereo User Group March 1-3, 2017, Valencia, Spain
The annual Opencast meeting will happen March 1-3, 2017 in Valencia, Spain. This event will showcase Opencast institutions and new developments and will hold meetings for the current and next releases of Opencast. We will hold also workshops for newbies and developers.
 
This year the summit will help together with the Spanish Sakai user group (S2U) meeting, and we will have a joint day of sessions on 1st of March.
 
If you are thinking on an open source lecture capture system for your institution, this is the place to be
 
More information in http://opencast2017.blogs.upv.es/(agenda coming soon)
-- Carlos Turro
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8) Opencast Workshop: Migrating from v 1.6 to v 2.3, February 8-9, 2017, Cologne, Germany
On February 8-9 there will be an Opencast workshop in Cologne, Germany, with the focus on users who are planning to migrate from Opencast 1.6 to Opencast 2.3. Part one highlights what has changed in the administration of the system: what has been improved and what has been changed. The second part tries to show solutions for the migration of the videos to the recent version. People interested in the workshop can register until the end of January for the workshop, by writing to rr...@uni-osnabrueck.de. The participation is free, but seats are limited.

The timing of this workshop was mainly influenced by institutions planning to migrate over the summer of 2017. For others and for those of you who cannot make it to Cologne: we will offer a condensed version of this workshop at the Valencia Opencast Summit, March 1-3rd, 2017 (http://opencast2017.blogs.upv.es/ ). If you have specific additional issues you would like to see covered, please contact us as soon as possible.
    
We hope that this workshop will not distract you from coming to the Valencia conference. If you can only make it to one of the events, the official summit would be our recommendation, as you will get a much broader overview of what is going on in the Opencast community.

Workshop Program:
Day 1 - Administration - Start 10:00am
- "Guided Tour" through the Opencast Admin UI
- Basics: Events, Series, Themes, Comments, Dashboard, Search    Box, Filters, etc.
- Video editing
- Differences to Opencast 1.x
- Substitution of the Opencast 1.x Hold State.
- Typical installation problems (i.e. ActiveMQ)
- Configuration 
- Improve the video encoding settings
- Create your own workflows
- External API: new ways to connect your LMS Opencast Player and alternatives
Day 2 - Migration - End 2:00 pm
- Archiving and backup of recordings
- Migration strategies 
- Parallel Installation
- “Full”-migration with database upgrade
- Migration script
- Typical problems encountered in the migration 
- Q&A on migration
    
We intend to have each day separated on one of the subjects, but as Day 1 has a very full agenda, we might need to shift some topics to Day 2.
-- Rudiger Rolf
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Project News & Releases

9) Update on the Image Quiz Project 
The Image Quiz Project was introduced last year with the aim of increasing comprehension of complex subjects through visual learning. The project is seeking collaborators and encourages use of the software. No programming experience is needed to use the software. 

Our greatest development need is for a C++ programmer who will help us release the C++ code on GitHub.

There are several new videos that introduce the software, and explain how to customize it by adding your own images:  
 
  • Lecture notes summarizing the longer video (you can jump to the sections that interest you): 
  • A video user manual on the JAVA version of the software:
 
Download the PC/JAVA software here:
Download the Mac/JAVA software here:
 
GitHub source code releases of the JAVA software:
 
Contact Bruce Kirchoff (bruce.k...@apereo.org) if you would like the C++ executables, or to join the team. The C++ software is the easiest to use outside of biology. The videos linked above explain how to add images to this software. No programming experience is needed to add images or use the software.
-- Bruce Kirchoff
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10) Opencast Releases New Major Version 2.3

The new major version, Opencast 2.3, has been released as scheduled before Christmas in December 2016. It introduces new features like the external application API as well as lots of bug fixes.

The maintenance release 2.2.4 has been released as well, fixing a security issue in Opencast 2.2.3.
--Lars Kiesow
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11) "Student Pulse" Visualizations for Learning Analytics Open Dashboard
Unicon is developing several new visualizations using the OpenDashboard framework. The visualizations are called “Student Pulse” and are meant to show the level of activity of students in a course. This feature gives instructors a visualization of whether and how students are participating over time.




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Instructors can view student activity over time, and by what time of day or what day or the week students are accessing the system. They also have the capability to find out whether students have opened the resources and materials that were posted for a given assignment. Instructors can access the Student Pulse from within their LMS course via LTI. The code will be available soon in the Apereo GitHub.

Student Pulse is one of the components of a new service offering from Unicon called LA Quick Start. LA Quick Start provides a way for institutions to quickly get started with learning analytics with minimal up-front investment.
-- Linda Feng, Software Architect, Unicon
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12) uPortal Accessibility Audit and Remediation
Unicon embarked on an audit to ensure that uPortal meets the Web Content Accessibility Standards AA level rating (WCAG 2.0 AA). Our accessibility experts spent a week reviewing every major page in uPortal, looking for places where uPortal fell short of the accessibility standard. We identified issues around difficult to use forms, difficult to see text, images without descriptive text, etc. In total, 155 issues were identified.

We spent three weeks going through each issue logged in the audit, resolving the accessibility issue, then requesting feedback from the uPortal community on the changes. Two uPortal community members and three Unicon developers (outside the original auditors) gave additional feedback on the accessibility fixes ensuring they met both accessibility and quality guidelines.

All of the accessibility changes are now a part of Apereo uPortal. Institutions can try the changes today by getting the latest unreleased code from Apereo, or they can wait for Apereo to officially release the changes in uPortal 4.3.2 (tentatively targeted for late February 2017) or uPortal 5.0.0 (tentatively targeted for June 2017). Going forward, Unicon would like to maintain the Web Content Accessibility Standard AA level compliance.

Our target of a Web Content Accessibility Standards AA level rating brings uPortal into compliance with U.S. federal laws (Section 504, Section 508, and ADA), French law (RGAA 2016), and Canadian law (AODA 2020), among others. It also offers improved usability, not only for users with disabilities, but for all students and staff members at an institution.
--Christian Murphy, UX Developer, Unicon
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Case Studies

13) Case Study: MyUW at University of Wisconsin
MyUW had a great 2016. This post summarizes some highlights.

Open source software products
MyUW developed several free and open source products in the course of delivering MyUW.


AngularJS-portal
MyUW shipped 20 releases of AngularJS-portal in 2016. AngularJS-portal is an alternative front end for uPortal. Progress included:
  • fixed accessibility bugs
  • proved out multi-tenant support (as implemented in MyUW, this software serves each of the University of Wisconsin campuses)
  • proved out unauthenticated experience support (this software delivers the public.my.wisc.edu experience)
  • adopted Material Design
  • redesigned search and header
  • enhanced notifications and announcements
  • detected and proactively handled expired sessions
  • added more and better widget templates (search with links, RSS)
  • eased adoption via overlay
  • documented
uw-frame
MyUW shipped 22 releases of uw-frame in 2016, from verion 2.0.1 to 3.0.3. uw-frame is the framework in which we develop angularjs-portal. uw-frame is also the framework in which we and other groups in the University of Wisconsin develop applications for inclusion in the portal. Writing a frame-based app is conceptually an alternative to writing a Java Portlet.
  • adopted Material Design
  • improved theme support
  • handled session timeouts proactively
  • cleaned up the way uw-frame is adopted in frame-based apps
  • sourced dependencies from CDNs
Microservices
The MyUW team shipped eight releases of a growing slate of supporting microservices in 2016.
  • KeyValueStore
  • lti-proxy
  • rest-proxy
  • rssToJson
  • token-crypt
We also participated directly in the development or release engineering of four Apereo WebProxy Portlet releases in 2016.
MyUW services
We develop these and other software products in order to operate them in the MyUW portal.
  • MyUW delivered around 10,000,000 user sessions in the course of serving UW-Madison and the entire University of Wisconsin system in 2016.
  • MyUW eases discovery of and navigation to other systems. In 2016, users followed a link in MyUW out to something outside MyUW more than 8,000,000 times.
  • Besides helping users navigate to other applications, MyUW helps users understand what they need to do and where they might need to navigate. MyUW presented its full notifications experience (not just the indicator that the user has a notification) around 100,000 times in 2016.
  • Not all MyUW content relevant to all users can fit on default home pages, so MyUW supports users searching and browsing the available content. MyUW presented the directory of applications around 100,000 times and provided search results in around 100,000 user sessions in 2016.
  • Once you’ve searched or browsed to something interesting, you can add it to your home page. Users modified their home pages almost one hundred thousand times in 2016, including adding the new Wiscard Balance widget almost 6,000 times.
Looking forward
Let’s do more to serve the portal needs of higher education and the University of Wisconsin in 2017.
-- Andrew Petro
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14) Case Study: Apereo Open LRS at Notre Dame
At Notre Dame we've been using the Apereo Open LRS for about a year.  At this point our implementation is just limited to the LRS and not to the full analytics.  For visualizations we use Kibana (https://www.elastic.co/products/kibana ) and have found it very useful for student data visualizations in a particular large multi-section f2f course hosted in Sakai. In fact, that course was designed with the collection of specific data points in mind.

Currently we're upgrading to the latest version of Open LRS which will enable us to feed data from multiple xAPI and Caliper sources into the LRS for a more integrated analysis of student learning activity. We hope to implement more of the Apereo Open Analytics Framework including Open Dashboard in the coming months.

For more information, contact Pat Miller,  pmi...@nd.edu. 
--Pat Miller, Learning Analytics, University of Notre Dame

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