Open Academic Environment (OAE) Back-End
You can find more about the Harpy Eagle here
16.0.0 is OAE's latest major release to date and it mostly includes architectural changes in order to make OAE more manageable and easier to contribute to.
The most important change is having ditched RabbitMQ and replaced it with Redis. This was due to several reasons:
Some other libraries have been updated, including node_redis (to ioredis), redback (to redlock) and nodemailer.
There are many other fixes, including:
oae-version
module with useful git checkshilary-deps
base image for Hilary dockeroae-release-tools
, oae-uservoice
, oae-mixpanel
and oae-mediacore
grunt
and bunyan-syslog
pdf2htmlEX
and "pdftotext` for mozilla's PDF.js (https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js)This version is all about shaping the path for the future with some changes focused on making onboarding and developing on OAE simpler. That includes upgrades to node and NPM, ditching grunt and grunt plugins, new XO/prettier styling and a set of new features (see below).
The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project is delighted to announce a new major release of the Apereo Open Academic Environment; OAE Quetzal or OAE 13.
OAE Quetzal is an important release for the Open Academic Environment software and includes many new features and integration options that are moving OAE towards the next generation academic ecosystem for teaching and research.
LTI, or Learning Tools Interoperability, is a specification that allows developers of learning applications to establish a standard way of integrating with different platforms. With Quetzal, Apereo OAE becomes an LTI consumer. In other words, users (currently only those with admin rights) can now add LTI standards compatible tools to their groups for other group members to use.
These could be tools for tests, a course chat, a grade book - or perhaps a virtual chemistry lab! The only limit is what tools are available, and the number of LTI-compatible tools is growing all the time.
Another important feature introduced to OAE in Quetzal is the ability to have face-to-face meetings using the embedded video conferencing tool, Jitsi. Jitsi is an open source project that allows users to talk to each other either one on one or in groups.
In OAE, it could have a number of uses - maybe a brainstorming session among members of a globally distributed research team, or holding office hours for students on a MOOC. Jitsi can be set up for all the tenancies under an OAE instance, or on a tenancy by tenancy basis.
This feature that has been widely requested by users: the ability to reset their password if they have forgotten it. Now a user in such a predicament can enter in their username, and they will receive an email with a one-time link to reset their password. Many thanks to Steven Zhou for his work on this feature!
Many new developers have been intimidated by the setup required to get Open Academic Environment up and running locally. For their benefit, we have now created a development environment using Docker containers that allows newcomers to get up and running much quicker.
We hope that this will attract new contributions and let more people to get involved with OAE.
The release includes new features, usability improvements and bug fixes.
Users can now link to other documents on the same OAE instance in group descriptions, and the links will be automatically converted to be relative to each users tenancy in multitenancy groups.
We have improved the way users in disabled tenancies are managed - for example, no emails will be generated for such users in the future.
The order in which attributes are requested from Shibboleth was changed to request least intrusive attributes first (although tenancies can make changes to this default configuration). A migration script was written to ensure that this will not cause any unexpected behaviour for existing tenancies using Shibboleth authentication.
There's a new API endpoint for administrators to see all users in a tenancy at /api/tenants/:tenantAlias/users
.
In 3akai-ux, we have updated Font Awesome icon library to a more recent version and changed our old, unsecure markdown library for a more recent one.
There's now a button on 404 and 401 pages that takes the user to the previous page. Additionally we have fixed the bug where the browser's back button would fail to work as expected on these pages.
This release comprises some new features, usability improvements and bug fixes.
Both tenant and global administators can now use the administration interface to add a new logo for a tenancy.
Private tenancies will no longer have content from other tenancies showing up in the search and similarly their content or users will never be visible in the search results of other tenancies.
If a link is created pointing directly to a file, we will no longer trigger a download prompt when it's opened. Instead, OAE will attempt to embed the file where possible.
A bug where some user thumbnails occasionally caused a 401 error in the activity feed was fixed, as was an error where some characters were rendering incorrectly in emails.
Deleted users will no longer have links to their homepages in groups. Additionally, a bug where a user's name would sometimes not be displayed correctly in a group's members list was fixed.
There is a new API endpoint at /api/user/<user-id>/groups/recent
for displaying a user's recently visited groups.
OAE Ibis brings the ability for institutions to completely customise the content and look of their tenant landing page. OAE Ibis also implements a detailed user tracking framework and brings the long-awaited full-text indexing and searching feature. Next to that, OAE Ibis also ships a range of other search improvements and a large number of accessibility improvements.
Customisable tenant landing pages
OAE Ibis makes it possible for institutions to completely customise their tenant landing page, allowing them to appropriately contextualise their tenancy, present themselves and explain the main purpose of the tenancy.
Tenant administrators are able to add any number of text, video and image blocks to the landing page, set their styling and determine their width on different devices, allowing for a fully responsive landing page to be configured. All configured text can also be fully internationalised.
We are already looking forward to seeing what the institutions will come up! We'll definitely publish a list of the best ones in an upcoming blog post.
User tracking
OAE Ibis introduces a detailed user tracking framework to provide a complete overview of how OAE is being used. Using an integration with a 3rd party service called Mixpanel, OAE can now keep track of almost all usage-related information: how many users have signed in, how many content items have been created and what is their distribution in visibility, how many comments were added, how many public groups are there and how does this evolve over time, etc.
This provides a solid basis for making product decisions based on real usage data and opens the door to performing A-B testing on new features. In a future release, we will also be providing this information to tenant administrators to give them a complete overview of how and how actively their tenancy is being used.
Full-text indexing
Following numerous rounds of performance testing, OAE Ibis brings the long-awaited arrival of full-text indexing and searching. The full content of all uploaded PDF, Office and text files will now be indexed and included in searches, making it a lot easier to find the content you're looking for or discover interesting new content.
Accessibility improvements
As the first step in the process of trying to obtain a WCAG 2.0 accessibility certification for OAE, a full external accessibility review of the OAE software has been undertaken by WebAIM. They delivered a review document containing a list of recommended accessibility improvements, which is something we'll be publishing and discussing in an upcoming blog post.
OAE Ibis includes accessibility improvements for the most critical issues that were identified in the review, with more accessibility improvements planned for upcoming releases.
Search improvements
Next to providing full-text searching, OAE Ibis also introduces a number of additional search improvements.
When searching for people, there will now be a slight bias towards people from your own institution. This should make it easier to find the people you're looking for, and is the first step towards making further improvements in this area.
Searches in content and discussion libraries will now also include the text of the comments and discussions posts, making it easier to find the content item or discussion you're looking for.
This upgrade makes it possible to configure the CAS login URL, supporting those schools that are a using a non-standard login URL. OAE 8.0.2 also improves the previews that are being generated for collaborative documents.
This upgrade will introduce the following new features and enhancements: