Apereo’s Board of Directors welcomed five members at their meeting in July 2022. Two members, Thierry Koscielniak and Salvador Pellicer, were re-elected to their organizational seats on the board in June. Three new members joined the board. Theresa Rowe, joined as Apereo’ Treasurer. Clint Lalonde was elected for his first term as an organizational member and Wes Turner was elected for his first term to the individual member seat on the board.

Everyone at Apereo welcomes our newest members and continues to be grateful to our returning members who chose to stand for the board. Thank you for your leadership and willingness to serve Apereo’s mission. 

Read more about the Apereo Board of Directors...

Apereo board of directors announced officerships for 2022-2023! Thank you to all of these volunteers for their hard work and dedication to the Foundation.

Read more about the Officers of Apereo Board of Directors...

Each year, the Apereo Foundation celebrates the many volunteer efforts, innovations, and success stories of our open source community. In 2022, the Apereo community honored Executive Director Emeritus, Ian Dolphin by naming the Apereo awards in his honor. The inaugural Apereo Dolphin Awards and Fellowships were announced at Open Apereo 2022. Join us in congratulating our recipients and thanking them for their service to the Foundation.

APEREO DOLPHIN FELLOWS 2022
Fellows are selected for their exceptional service and contributions to the Apereo community. Recipients' roles vary and include software development, project management, community engagement, or other areas that support projects and people across the Foundation.

Alan Regan, Pepperdine University
The Apereo Board was particularly impressed with Alan’s commitment to Apereo and Sakai over the past ten years, from his work advocating for teachers and learners through user-driven development initiatives to his broader foundation-wide contributions supporting the annual Open Apereo Conference. Thank you, Alan, for your commitment to Apereo, Sakai, open source software, and higher education.

Carlos Ribalta, Universitat Politècnica de València
The Apereo Board was particularly impressed with Carlos’ commitment to Apereo and the Opencast project, from his technical contributions with the new Paella player to his collaboration across the community to ensure accessibility and usability are top of mind in design and development. Thank you, Carlos!

Christopher Beach, Unicon, Inc.
The Apereo Board was impressed with Christopher’s commitment to Apereo, open source software, and community through his advocacy of OpenEQUELLA, technical contributions to uPortal, and leadership as a steering committee member, committer, and release manager. Thank you, Christopher!

Julianne Morgan, University of Dayton
The Apereo Board was particularly impressed with Julianne’s commitment to Apereo and Sakai through years of--often behind-the-scenes--contributions helping to define and drive improvements in Sakai. Julianne’s involvement with the Sakai marketing team, outreach at the Educause ELI conference, and participation with SakaiCon were just a few of her contributions listed in the fellow nomination. Thank you, Julianne!

APEREO DOLPHIN AWARDEES 2022

Tobias Thelen, Universität Osnabrück
Tobias Thelen has been awarded the Dolphin Award for Teaching and Learning.

This Dolphin Award recognizes innovation in teaching and learning using open source software, promoting excellent pedagogy, sharing new practices in education, and encouraging more faculty involvement in software evolution.

The Apereo Board was particularly impressed with Tobias’ continued efforts to improve educational technology in teaching and learning over the last ten years. Innovative flipped classrooms and his new "Open Source Software Development" course inspired students and colleagues to explore new modes of education and the software to deliver it. On a technical note, the Board congratulates Tobias on his success in integrating open source tools for building online courses directly into the University's learning management system, an approach now used by several other universities. Congratulations Tobias and thank you!

Jim Helwig, University of Wisconsin
Jim Helwig has been awarded the inaugural Dolphin Award for Innovation, Advocacy, and Networking, "The IAN."

The IAN recognizes creative and visionary community members who promote and propel open source initiatives to meet higher education's diverse and evolving needs. 

The Apereo Board was particularly impressed with Jim’s record of leadership in the Apereo community across several projects and initiatives. A few examples of Jim's service to the community include his roles as a member of the Apereo and Jasig Boards, holding multiple roles with the uPortal Project including chairing the uPortal Steering Committee and serving on the Apereo Financial Committee. Thank you Jim, Apereo appreciates all you have done and continue to do for the Foundation!

2021/2022 Crowdfunding
ELAN e.V. and Greg Logan finished the work for the 2021/2022 crowdfunding. The tasks included a lot of patches related to infrastructure, like removing Opencast’s dependencies towards Apache ActiveMQ and Apache Solr. Additionally, extensive work on security evaluations and fixes was completed.

Read about what we set out to do at opencast.org/2022/02/10/crowdfunding-an-update/

Opencast 2022/2023 Roadmap Announced
Following the 2022 Opencast summit, the Board followed up on a number of projects, efforts, and plans institutions and individuals presented to integrate them into a roadmap we would like to share with the community.

Opencast 12: Per our release schedule, Opencast 12 was released on June 15. It will be supported until next June, with our usual monthly release cycle. Opencast 12.1 was released on July 20th, 2022.

Opencast 11: Opencast 11 continues to see ongoing releases with 11.9 being released on July 6th.

Opencast 10: Opencast 10’s support period ended with Opencast 12’s release.  All users are highly encouraged to upgrade as soon as possible!

Release Sakai 22.1
Sakai 22.1 has 204 improvements including: 

• 44 fixes in Assignments
• 10 fixes in Basic LTI
• 14 fixes in Forums/Discussions
• 13 fixes in Gradebook
• 12 fixes in Lessons
• 24 fixes in Rubrics
• 20 fixes in Tests & Quizzes

https://www.apereo.org/projects/sakai-lms/sakai-221

Release Sakai 20.6
As usual, our thanks go out to the dedicated Sakai Community volunteers from around the world who have made this release possible. Many institutions from around the world made a significant contribution to the Sakai release including development, bug fixing, QA testing, and documentation of Sakai 19.

The uPortal steering committee welcomed three new members in June 2022.

https://www.apereo.org/content/2022-uportal-steering-committee-elections

The Apereo Foundation is deeply grateful to our member organizations for their continued support of the foundation and project communities. 

• Lafayette College
• Kyoto University
• Universidad Publica de Navarra
• Hotelschool the Hauge
• University of Cape Town
• Albany Medical College
• University of Stuttgart
• INP Toulouse
• ELAN e.V.
• University of Michigan
• MCI Management Center, Innsbruck