Pictured: Jenn Cummings (Apereo Staff), Tom Reijnders (Xerte), Patrick Masson (Apereo Staff), Inge Donkervoort (Xerte and Apereo Board), Zuzana Mullerova (Unitime), Tomas Muller (Unitime). Missing: Chris Knapp (Sakai)

1. Introducing the FOA Ambassadors: this unique initiative invites members from Friends of Apereo to engage with outstanding leaders from the Apereo community. Members can access a dedicated LinkedIn group offering insights on institutional issues involving open initiatives, strategies for encouraging the adoption of open source projects and practices, career and professional development, and other discussions to further personal and institutional goals. We are delighted to welcome our first three ambassadors, Lucy Appert, Theresa Rowe, and Steve Swinsburg. You can take advantage of this unique opportunity by joining FOA today!
   
   
2. Expanded Representation on the Apereo Board: The Apereo Board of Directors has added two new individual member seats, one for the 2024 election and another for the 2025 election. This expansion gives FOA members three seats on the Apereo Board, allowing them to engage more deeply with the Foundation, helping define the direction of Apereo annually. This expanded representation ensures that Friends of Apereo members have a significant voice in shaping Apereo's future.
   
   
3. Help Us Reach Our Goal of 1,000 Friends of Apereo by December 2024!: Join the Friends of Apereo membership drive and be a part of shaping the future of educational technology. Your membership provides critical funding to support the Foundation and its projects, ensuring the sustainability of open source software that enhances education worldwide. More than just a funding campaign, Friends of Apereo fosters collaboration, idea exchange, and inspiration. By becoming a member, you contribute to our mission of innovation and collaboration in education technology. Together, we can make a lasting impact on institutions and learners everywhere. Join us today and be a part of this exciting journey!

Apereo Foundation Welcomes Five New Board Members

Beaverton, OR, USA, July 12, 2024 — The Apereo Foundation is pleased to announce the appointment of five distinguished professionals to its Board of Directors, each with decades of combined open source and higher education experience. The new board members hail from diverse fields–academia, open source communities, and business and industry–representing Apereo’s multi-disciplinary and international membership. This year’s election included four open seats, three Organizational Member seats, and one Individual Member seat. Final voting for the 2024 seats resulted in the election of Stephanie Lieggi, Angela Newell, and Josh Wilson for the three open organizational seats, with Daniel Izquierdo Cortázar winning the individual seat. However, after the 2024 polls opened in June, Clint Lalonde announced his resignation from the board, and an additional Organizational Member seat opened. To fill this vacancy, the current Apereo Board invited Wilma Hodges, also a 2024 Apereo Board candidate, to fill the seat and serve a one-year interim term. “I’m excited to welcome our new board members and so grateful for their willingness to serve our community and its members,” said Patrick Masson, Apereo’s Executive Director. “Their expertise and experience provide just the leadership the Foundation needs in its vital role in seeding, scaling, and sustaining open source in and for higher education. Please join me in welcoming and thanking them all.”

Welcome!

Stephanie Lieggi is the Executive Director of the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) at the University of California, Santa Cruz

Angela Newell is the Director of Communication, Governance, and Innovation in the Office of the Vice President and Chief Information Officer, as well as the Director of the Open Source Program Office at The University of Texas at Austin

Josh Wilson is the principal at Flywheel Strategies, co-founder at B.Cognition Labs, and the Vice Chair of the Apereo Foundation’s Board of Directors

Daniel Izquierdo Cortázar is the Chief Executive Officer at Bitergia

Wilma Hodges is the Director of Training and eLearning Initiatives at Longsight and is the Sakai Community Manager

Driving Community & Membership Growth
Jenn's new position, dedicated to supporting and growing Apereo's supporters, contributors, membership, and network, will re-invigorate our community through a host of dynamic activities designed to more deeply engage the Foundation's current projects, campuses, commercial affiliates, and peer organizations while building a broader, more stable, ecosystem for open source in higher education. From interactive webinars and insightful blogs to engaging meetups and comprehensive training sessions, Jenn's strategies aim to make it easier and more rewarding to be a part of Apereo. 

Building Stronger Connections
As a dedicated community advocate, Jenn will be the voice of our members, ensuring your needs shape the future of Apereo. She will work closely with project teams to deliver valuable resources and services that resonate with our community. Expect to see more tailored content and events that reflect our members' diverse interests and needs.

Engaging and Exciting Events
Jenn's past work with Apereo has focused on organizing and managing events like Open Apereo. This expertise in conference planning will extend Apereo's presence and opportunities for our projects, bringing our internal community closer and expanding Apereo's reach across higher education and open source. You can look forward to extended participation in the global ecosystem through dedicated education tracks at conferences, topic-specific podcasts and online forums, and deeper engagements with peer communities events and meetups, all to showcase the incredible work happening within Apereo to a broader audience.

Streamlined Membership Management
Under Jenn's leadership, membership management will be more efficient and responsive, leading to more deeply engaged and invested members. Relevant, authentic relationships that benefit the Foundation and its members promote stronger ties, focused delivery, better outcomes, and ultimately, sustainability for the Foundation, our projects, and open source in higher education. Jenn will work closely with other Apereo staff to keep everyone informed and engaged with the latest Foundation news and opportunities while identifying potential opportunities for deeper, more beneficial collaborations and partnerships.

Enhancing the Membership Experience
Jenn will conduct in-depth community analysis to better understand your needs, open source trends, and higher education's expectations, identifying shared interests and peer communities within colleges and universities. This will lead to the development of new and improved services that enhance the value of being an Apereo member. With a dedicated community and membership manager, Apereo can continually respond to and refine our community engagement strategy to ensure it meets and exceeds your expectations.

Thank You Jenn
Jenn Cummings is here to make a significant impact, and I can't wait for you to experience the positive changes she will bring. Join me in welcoming Jenn to her new role at The Apereo Foundation, and stay tuned for all the exciting developments ahead!

Contact Jenn at community@apereo.org

By: Michelle Hall, Apereo Communications

I am pleased to announce the public release of the new apereo.org! Thank you to the Apereo Staff, Board and Content Working Group, PMC members, and other community members who helped review and re-write every page for the new website. Over 2,000 content pages were reviewed, redesigned, or retired in this project. Thanks to our Oregon State Open Source Lab partners for their assistance and to Arlen Johnson at Spherical Cow Group for the technical and UI design and implementation of this Drupal 10 site. 

Please send your news and events to michelle.hall@apereo.org

By: Bryan Ollendyke, HAX Community Lead

Introduction to HAX: HAX empowers any website by utilizing the HTML tag, providing an accessible, intuitive editor experience. This innovation seamlessly integrates into HAXcms, a comprehensive content management system designed for building Open Educational Resources (OER) without students or faculty needing to grasp HTML intricacies.

Recent HAX Update: HAX has begun implementing a unified design system code-named DDD. Version 8.0.2, released in March, implements the unified design system called Develop, Design, Destroy (DDD); named for the process of growing and expanding a new idea from a whiteboard (aka HAX itself) into a design system and ultimately supplanting existing products in the space. 

This makes themes and blocks feel like they were produced all at once rather than over several years by many people of varying abilities. DDD is now being used in Penn State’s IST 256: Programming for the Web course to ensure all future HAX contributions worked on by students look and feel unified.  DDD is being retroactively applied across the entire system and will be fully in place by HAX 9, due out in mid-August. You can read more about DDD and see it in action in our new design documentation section: https://oer.hax.psu.edu/bto108/sites/haxcellence/documentation/ddd

As a result of DDD, Invent Penn State https://invent.psu.edu/, an innovation and entrepreneurial arm of the university, has begun contributing resources to HAX, including staffing and community conversations. Invent Penn State has begun rolling out several online training courses, the first of which is about Customer Discovery.

The HAX.PSU homepage and documentation site have begun to get the same visual treatment DDD provides to other HAX properties. HAX is used in dozens of online courses, including many OER courses found in Eberly College of Science, and it will power the Learning Design Summer Camp site. HAX is being looked at for more than just courses, given recent visual updates. Our promotional site recently underwent a content audit to ensure we appropriately market and promote the project to different audiences, whether they be faculty, staff, marketers, students, or casual bloggers. If you are interested in implementing or learning more about HAX, be sure to check out https://hax.psu.edu/

To learn more about HAX and how to become involved, contact Bryan Ollendyke at - bryan.ollendyke@apereo.org

We would love to have 100% Apereo participation in this survey! Please take a moment to answer a few questions

The Annual General Meeting of the Apereo Foundation will be held virtually on July 24th, 2024 at 9am Eastern U.S. Time.  The AGM will be held during the first half of the regular meeting of the Apereo Board of Directors. The meeting is open to the public. You can join us in the Open Meetings room of Big Blue Button.

Apereo Micro Conferences continue to be a great success! We are learning and growing as a community! These free events are a great way to introduce potential members to Apereo as an organization. Please consider joining the mailing list for micro conferences and forwarding the invitations to friends and colleagues via email or reposting our social media announcements.

You can catch up on the 2023-2024 Micro Conferences on the Apereo YouTube channel.

SUMMER BREAK!
We will have a short hiatus from micro-conf as Apereo staff will be traveling to FOSSY and preparing for other in-person conferences coming up this fall.

Thanks to our PMC members for their feedback as we iterate on how best to serve the community. The PMC gatherings will take place quarterly, with our next ones in August!

Second Thursday and Friday every three months. Save the dates!

• Thursday, August 8th
• Friday, August 9th
• Thursday, November 8th
• Friday, November 14th

10-minute updates from Patrick are available for the February and March meetings.

Contact Jenn Cummings to join the invitation list: community@apereo.org

phpCAS needs a new champion…is it you?
After 15+ years of being the technical lead for phpCAS, Joachim Fritschi, has made the difficult decision to step down from that role. He has put out a request on behalf of the CAS project for a technical successor and a few developers to take over the management of the phpCAS project. Anyone interested in taking on this role should contact the CAS team - cas-pmc@apereo.org

Many thanks to Joachim for continuing to champion phpCAS and for being an invaluable leader for an Apereo project! 

Apereo CAS is now on Develocity
CAS is now relying on Develocity to improve build and test feedback cycle times. The Apereo CAS Develocity instance is completely public and provides the project with a dashboard to analyze build scans as well as powerful build caching techniques making both CI and local builds extremely fast and efficient. CAS has also turned on Develocity’s Predictive Test Selection features for all of its unit tests. This is a superb Develocity feature that saves testing time by identifying, prioritizing, and running only tests that are likely to provide useful feedback during test runs.

Read the full blog post on CAS’s github.io site.

Opencast Community Gathered for Bug Bash in June
Many community members participated in an Opencast BugBash to help to improve the new admin interface and get rid of a lot of minor, yet annoying little bugs which were still present in the project. All this work was in preparation for the release of Opencast 16.0!

Review: 2024 Opencast Summit, March 13-15: More than 50 people from 10 countries joined the international community meeting in Zaragoza, Spain. The meeting coincided with a meeting of the Spanish colleagues engaged in the “DigiRepo” project, an open repository of digital resources for universities using Opencast as a video repository. The Opencast summit saw a good mixture of presentations and discussions, making the best of our annual gathering. Also, capture agents were a major topic, with Extron introducing new hardware and Epiphan returning to the Opencast community.

Crowdfunding 2023/2024
University of Bern set the pace with a very generous contribution towards an area of work often overlooked in that they made sure current and future security issues will be dealt with.
To round off the “alpine touch” of the crowdfunding 

• TU Vienna,
• The University of Vienna, and Austria’s
• Academic Moodle Cooperation (AMC)

sponsored development efforts to create “playlists”, further improve the editor and work on “life cycle management” features in Opencast.

Thanks to all our sponsors and their ongoing support for Opencast!

Opencast Releases

Opencast 16 and 16.1
We are happy to announce that Opencast 16 has been released as planned on June 12, 2024. The new release is another push to modernize and simplify our architecture and infrastructure. But it also comes with new features and is yet another push towards updating our user interfaces.

Some highlights of Opencast 16 are:

• The new admin interface got lots of improvements during the recent Opencast “BugBash.” Over 30 admins and developers came together to identify problems with the new interface and fix them. With over 60 fixes, this improved the usability a lot but also caught a few hidden bugs that could have had larger consequences.
• Playlists are now supported in Opencast and can be used in integrations like LMS plugins or the video portal. Playlists can be used to group and sort recordings. Unlike series, the same video can be part of several playlists.
• The search index infrastructure was simplified and modernized. Opencast no longer uses Solr, but now uses OpenSearch across all the cluster nodes. This is not only great to make the project structure easier to understand, but also means that we were able to remove a component with lots of known security vulnerabilities which now don’t have to be mitigated any longer.

Opencast 16 will be supported for one year, until the release of Opencast 18. It will get monthly maintenance releases.

Thank you to all the contributors who made this release possible!

• Opencast 16.0
• Opencast 16.1

Most importantly 16.1 fixed a bug that made it impossible for Opencast 16 to
work on clustered systems!

Opencast 15
Opencast 15 continues to see active development with its initial release in December of 2023, monthly maintenance releases since then.  Opencast 15 brings many backend upgrades, including multiple storage support, as well as whispercpp support for speech to text.

openEQUELLA 2024.1

https://www.apereo.org/news/2024/openequella-20241-released

The Power of Funding Open Source Communities: How the Spanish Sakai Users Group Accomplished Incredible Change for the Platform and the Global Community

The Unidigital plan was developed by the Spanish Ministry of Universities for the modernization of its university system through the European Union's Next Generation Funds. Part of its financial support was aimed at "Boosting interuniversity projects of strategic and interdisciplinary digital innovation." There was nothing more "interuniversity" than the S2U group and nothing more "strategic and interdisciplinary" than an LMS. Everything fit together like a puzzle, but quick action was needed. Read more of this account by Daniel Merino Echeverría, Universidad Pública de Navarra.

Xerte in Flanders

Visiting Antwerp, Flanders, Belgium

On Wednesday, April 10, Jurjen Schetsberg and Corine Martens of Deltion College traveled to Antwerp. They were guests of Katrien Bernaerts and colleague Jan Colsoul at the Flemish administrative center. Katrien and Jan work for the Flemish government on digital skills and developing and sharing open learning materials within Flemish education. During the visit, a lot of knowledge and experience was exchanged about the open sharing of learning materials made with Xerte and H5P.

Within the Digisprong Knowledge Center in Flanders, where Katrien and Jan work, they use one Xerte installation for the whole of Flanders. So not per school, but one joint national installation. This means that they work with 3,000 teachers in Xerte in Flanders and have jointly created more than 21,000 learning objects. In H5P, 5,000 teachers work with 17,000 objects.

Translated from the original Dutch. Read the full article in the Xerte Nieuwsbrief | nr. 25 Editie: April 2024

Foundation Membership +Project Support

• ETH Zurich, Foundation, +Opencast
• Entornos de Formación S.L (EDF), Foundation, +SakaiLMS
• Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart / University of Applied Sciences, Foundation, +Opencast
• Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, Foundation
• University of Stuttgart, Foundation, +Opencast
• Unicon, Foundation
• Tirasa S.r.l. Foundation, +CAS
• Longsight, Foundation, +Sakai
• Nagoya University,  Foundation, +Sakai, +CAS and +uPortal
• Princeton University, Platinum Foundation, +CAS
• Hotelschool The Hague, Foundation, +Sakai
• Learning Experiences, Platinum Foundation
• The University of Edinburgh, Platinum Foundation
• Universidad Publica de Navarra  - Foundation +Sakai, +uPortal and +Bedework
• Kyoto University - Platinum Foundation +Sakai
• Universität Konstanz - Foundation +Opencast
• Duke University - Foundation Platinum +Sakai +Bedework
• Pepperdine University - Foundation +Sakai +CAS

• North-West University, South Africa - Foundation +Sakai

• MCI Internationale Hochschule - Foundation +Sakai

Contact membership@apereo.org to learn more about how you can support Apereo - the home of open source for education.

Contact our newsletter editorial team at newsletter@apereo.org or contact Michelle Hall, Apereo Communications Manager, at michelle.hall@apereo.org.

Follow Apereo on LinkedIn for the latest news and updates!