If open educational resources are to truly compete with commercial publishers, we must provide a full set of open capabilities that support a book. Publishers provide learning resources in a learning object repository (LOR) that allows remixing and easy integration into learning management systems using protocols like LTI. Publishers provide learning resources like slides, assignment, and interactive software to help those who use the book. Every open book should also have a truly free and open MOOC associated with the book that does not depend on any institutional LMS or MOOC hosting provider. We need the ability to have a OER website for a book, a “LOR of my Own”, an “LMS of my Own” and a “MOOC of my Own” using only our locally owned and controlled resources. The tsugi.org project in effect is the WordPress for Open Education. By downloading, configuring, and hosting a simple PHP application augmented by free content delivery networks, it is possible to deploy a scalable worldwide MOOC with surprisingly low cost. This presentation will introduce the tsugi.org software and show how it is used to build sites like www.py4e.com.

Submitted to: Open Textbook Summit 2017 – May 24-25, 2017 at SFU Harbour Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada)

The past year has been very eventful for Sakai. The Sakai-11 release was completed with the new frameless (Morpheus) portal, new Grade Book, responsive design, and many other game changing features to bring Sakai very much in line with the best LMS systems in the marketplace. A large number of Sakai sites are moving their production to Sakai 11 and we are working on a Sakai-12 release. This presentation will will give a brief summary of the Sakai project to date as well as expectations for the next year. The presentation will also feature a question and answer session with members of the Sakai Project Management Committee (PMC).

Submitted to: Open Apereo 2017 – Sheraton Philadelphia Society Hill Hotel, PA | June 4-June 8, 2017

The past year has brought a lot of progress and adoption in the Tsugi project. A NodeJS version of Tsugi has been developed in addition of the existing PHP and Java implementations. The library code has been refactored to focus on providing the Tsugi libraries using the Composer dependency management system. Support for IMS Common Cartridge and IMS Content Item has been added so as to allow Tsugi to function as a Learning Object Repository in addition to an Application Store. These new functions have been combined together to produce a truly “next generation” Learning Management System that enables an “indie” publisher to deploy a topic-oriented, LMS, MOOC, LOR, and App Store using low-cost readily available hosting infrastructure. This presentation will provide an over view of the current status and plans for Tsugi going forward.

Submitted to: Open Apereo 2017 – Sheraton Philadelphia Society Hill Hotel, PA | June 4-June 8, 2017

The Tsugi project is providing technology to enable a wide range of educational technology use cases. Initially, Tsugi was developed to simplify the development of educational tools and to allow those tools to be deployed in an “App Store” pattern using IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (1.1 and 2.0). More recently, Tsugi has added support for IMS Common Cartridge, IMS Content Item, and a Lessons capability that allows Tsugi to function as a Learning Object Repository that is easily integrated into existing LMS systems. Tsugi is also evolving into an easy-to deploy Learning Management System focused on supporting a web site for a single class or topic. We call this use case a “MOOC of Our Own”. Tsugi can both support individual deployments as well as institutional-scale deployments. This workshop will walk through a Tsugi installation and configuration and experiment with using Tsugi as both an application development environment, a Learning Object Repository, and an Application Store.

Submitted to: Open Apereo 2017 – Sheraton Philadelphia Society Hill Hotel, PA | June 4-June 8, 2017