The Open Apereo 2017 conference took place last week in Philadelphia and it provided a great opportunity for the OAE Project team to meet and network for three whole days. The conference days were chock full of interesting presentations and workshops, with the major topic being the next generation digital learning environment (NGDLE). Malcolm Brown's keynote was a particularly interesting take on this topic, although at that point the OAE team was still reeling from having a picture from our Tsugi meeting come up during the welcome speech - that was a surprising start for the conference! We made note about how the words 'app store' kept popping up in presentations and in talks among the attendees again and again - perhaps this is something we can work towards offering within the OAE soon? Watch this space...
The team also met with people from many other Apereo projects and talked about current and future integration work with several project members, including Charles Severance from Tsugi, Opencast's Stephen Marquard and Jesus and Fred from Big Blue Button. There's some exciting work to be done in the next few weeks... While Quetzal was released only a few days before the conference, we are now teeming with new ideas for OAE 14!
After the conference events were over on Wednesday, we gathered together to have a stakeholders meeting where we discussed strategy, priorities and next steps. We hope to be delivering some great news very soon.
During the conference, the OAE team also provided assistance to attendees in using the Open Apereo 2017 group hosted on *Unity that supported the online discussion of presentation topics. A lot of content was created during the conference days so be sure to check it out if you're looking for slides and/or links to recorded videos. The group is public and can be accessed from here.
OAE team members who attended the conference were Miguel and Salla from *Unity and Mathilde, Frédéric and Alain from ESUP-Portail.