Title | ESUP-Portail and Ja Sakai: A Global and National Approach to Open Source in France and Japan |
|---|---|
Presenters | Alain Mayeur (University of Valenciennes) Mathilde Guerin (University of La Rochelle) Kazuo Yana (Hosei University) |
Date and time (EDT) | June 12 10:45 AM |
Room | Peachtree Ballroom |
Facilitator | (Empty for now - What's this?) |
Description
ESUP-Portail is a French Consortium of education and research institutions to promote and develop open-source solutions for higher education in the field of portal of digital services for students and staff. The main goals are to:
- facilitate learning and campus life for students... but also the daily work of the staff
- pool service development between universities to share costs
- share technological developments and new services amongst the members
- plan and design future advances of digital workspaces (portal of services)
ESUP-Portail is a national organization of more than 70 institutions of higher education. The solutions it supports are selected in the field of open-source that allows a continuous evolution of services and tools. Since 2003, ESUP-portail has developed exchanges with the Jasig community and used both uPortal and CAS solutions. It is noteworthy that the Consortium has a close working relationship with the French Ministry of Higher Education, which is an extremely valuable help to actually implement the ESUP's global strategy. To keep the whole community up-to-date and informed of its strategy and work, the Consortium organizes two conferences a year (so far, it has held 13 conferences with more than 100 participants each time).
User experience feedback is always an important point of these ESUP-Days. These seminars also offer the opportunity to communicate about the strategy of Jasig and Sakai and, more recently, the objectives and challenges of the Jasig-Sakai merged structure. ESUP-Portail is also organized in working groups (thematic "workshops"...) such as ESUP-ECM, ESUP-Grouper, ESUP-HCI, ESUP-Mobile,...
A global approach: The community facilitates the exchanges (both within our community and beyond) and helps to the definition of the digital priorities, such as the choice of components and their interface with information systems. One of our priorities is to explore open-source solutions and their potential integration in portal (ECM, e-learning, digital desktop, repository, collaborative platform, CMS....). Sakai OAE may be added to the digital environment to offer new and innovative services for education and research community. It opens up new fields of developments, based on recent technologies and collaborative concepts applied in education.
Examples of projects:
- esup-commons v.2: Esup-commons is a development framework that allows developers to build applications that can be deployed either as portlets or servlets -sharing exactly the same code- and offers many other interesting features. All new development projects of the consortium are encouraged to use this framework, and several trainings are organized all over the country to encourage widespread use of these new technologies.
- Packaging of ESUP v.4 : One of the main missions of the Consortium is to deliver a French package of the uPortal releases: the uPortal 4 is no exception. This work is necessary to include specific needs and requests of the French institutions, in a consistent approach which involves not only uPortal but also various projects such as Grouper, uMobile, etc. Other activities revolve around internationalization, look-and-feel customization, services adaptation, etc.
- Showcases of the integration of e-learning platforms (Moodle, Sakai CLE, Dokeos...) into the ESUP-Portail environment.
- Introducing ECM functionalities in the portal and creation of connectors with other applications
Mobility is one of the main priorities for the development of IT use on campus. In the last few years, the use of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.) has become more and more widespread, especially among youth such as our students. Having come to this realization, the Consortium decided to create the ESUP-Mobile Working Group. Its goal is to promote collaboration and pooling of resources to help institutions provide mobiles services to their users. In addition to developing mobile-friendly services to integrate into portals, ESUP- Mobile is now also looking into the uMobile solution provided by Jasig. Some of its members have come up with a few services (geolocation, augmented reality, etc.) they are willing to share with the Jasig community. In the wake of 2012, both ESUP-Portail and Jasig communities came to the conclusion that it would be a great idea to increase communication and collaboration with each other on this matter: this resulted in the participation of some ESUP-Mobile members in the uMobile Working Group and Community calls.
These exchanges contributed to what is hopefully going to be a long, fruitful and more global collaboration between the Jasig, Sakai and ESUP communities.
Materials
Watch the video of the uMobile modules developped by the ESUP-Portail community:
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