Open Apereo 2021: openEQUELLA Community Updates
Jun 9, 2021 19:03 · 2649 words · 13 minute read
hi my name is Alistair Oliver director with edalex and a member of the open equella global advisory group today i’m going to talk to you about the platform explain what it does its purpose and how institutions globally are using the platform i’ll also talk about its roadmap to start with let me tell you about edalex edalex and its staff have been working with open equella for a number of years we partner with other providers of open equella support around the world and we’re currently responsible for all open equella development so what is open equella traditionally open equella is known as a learning content management system with its primary purpose to store learning content however over time it has evolved to be known as a digital repository in that it’s capable of storing any type of digital content whether that content relates to learning content research materials library assets or media assets as a single point for managing and finding digital content institutional users are easily able to find content reuse it and repurpose it content within equella can relate to copyright materials and content can also be tagged with digital rights open equella has a powerful workflow engine so that content that has to undertake a quality assurance process can easily be reviewed it also handles archiving and versioning of content but for most of our users equella is used in connection with their learning management system so whilst learning management systems do many things very well they are very course-centric in that content is often locked down within a particular course whereas open equella opens up that content so that many many users across the institution can access it open equella has been implemented in a wide number of ways by our clients to start with most clients use the platform to store learning resources or open educational resources that are then linked into third-party platforms such as the learning management system but over time institutions recognise they’re able to store any type of digital content within the platform so many of these other use cases can often apply such as the storage of copyright materials the development of thesis collections the storage of resources relating to research such as research materials and publications and also for institutional governments including the storage of really any type of digital asset open equella is currently used by a large number of universities tafe and community college systems k-12 departments and corporate training providers around the world so let’s hear from some of open equella’s users hi my name is paul and i’m going to show you how to access and use tafe queensland learning content management system badged resource bank resource bank is an open equella application used to support the management of master product licenses and associated content images supplementary content staff training resources and commercial product access this includes tafe queensland own resources and externally owned resources that tafe queensland have licensed or have permission to use all staff of tafe queensland can access resource bank 24 7 both from on campus or from an external location resourcebank provides the ability for staff to contribute discover and use resources across the state which has assisted in the consolidation of development time consistency of unit content and access to the most recent version of master product our master product the units of competency that have been developed quality checked and are made ready for delivery including assessment content exports from our learning management system and the original source files so what’s coming next we’re looking forward to the next upgrade which will introduce an improved image gallery with lightbox display appearances for our image collection so um california college of the arts i’ll just really briefly um tell you about it because we’re a relatively smallish institution um this year kind of post covid disruption we’re at 1600 fte um last year we were a little closer to 2000 so you know we’re dealing with that um we have two campuses san francisco and oakland and our faculty body is largely made up of practicing artists and designers um so this makes for an institutional culture of experimentation agility flexibility lots of need everybody wants their own thing right so nothing terribly unique but a very big driving force in our implementation of openequella so first i wanted to mention just our customized theme everyone can go to vault.
cca. edu we call our instance vault um we created a dashboard portlet that pulls images from different collections and you can see here we have student work library collections campus planning these are all different tabs and every time you come back to the dashboard it pulls up another random set of images um and so this was an idea that we had to kind of highlight images from different collections because it’s so big i mean we have over 73 000 records many of those have multiple files associated with each record and so it just becomes so vast and so big we first implemented equella when it was equella in 2011 so we’re coming up on 10 years now um so there’s a lot of stuff in there uh aviation australia we’re a aviation training college in based out of brisbane our main main training center is in brisbane but we have campuses around australia and and even over overseas we focus mainly on uh aircraft maintenance engineering training so uh both um theoretical and a lot and practical so we have practical facilities and that small image there in the left is a sample of the track training that we have we also do flight attendant training uh a little bit of pilot training and i guess one of the growth sectors in aviation is the remote pilot training so one of our primary focuses for bringing in equella was maintaining compliance so being easily or readily able to illustrate compliance with all of those regulators the regulated environment so we have to have approvals and authorizations to provide both the practical training and the content training so that our students walk away with the option for licensing so to maintain compliance across all of those or maintain our content compliance with all of those organizations we put together a lot of taxonomies i guess a lot of terms that we applied to the content to so that if we are audited we can easily search within our uh repository and pull back uh the resources relevant to that that particular term so that auditors can you know readily see what it is we deliver and make sure the content is um fit for purpose but also uh in accordance with the regulations so how is open equella evolving the key focus over the last 12 months has been to overhaul the user interface as a mature platform it was in desperate need of a refresh this development will continue for the next couple of years given the size and maturity of the platform in addition to the work on the ui there’s been extensive work completed on accessibility improvements a number of key dependency upgrades as well as patching of a large number of versions before we provide a little bit more of an overview of equella’s new user interface it’s important to see where we’ve come from here you can see the legacy ui available within the platform and on this screen we can see what the ui now looks like cath fitzgerald our product manager will now show you the new user interface hi i’m cath fitzgerald i’m product manager for open equella with edalex and i’d like to show you an overview of the new search ui that has been released in 2020.
2 first of all we need to make sure under our ui settings that we have the new search page ui switched on when we go to the new search page we can see that there’s four main panels there’s the search query bar up the top here there’s search results the refine search panel and then classifications so let’s take a look at the search query bar first so the default search is actually a wild card search and there’s an invisible wild card asterisk that you can’t see when we start typing in so it finds anything that starts with what you’ve typed in and it can end with anything else so you can see here we’ve got kelp we’ve got kelpies as well um we also have a raw search option and this is kind of an exact match although it still supports stemming and stop words so you can see it’s only returned to kelp there now let’s have a look at our search results panel so you can see we have our search results and we also have um the number of search results showing there just remove that so we have a few more okay so we can see that we have a thumbnail for each of our results and that will be the first attachment that is listed in the item we have default thumbnails for different mime types if there isn’t actually an image etc to show and for any that don’t have any attachments we have this default thumbnail which we thought depicted metadata well just metadata for each one of our attachments we can preview so you can see it will show the preview uh you can even preview videos in here so we have a video here and you can actually press play and preview the video from in here we can also just see that stop that yes and if there are mime types such as links and documents etc it may open a new tab and preview them in the new tab we also have our status the last time it was modified and if we mouse over the modified time it will give us an exact date and time and we have the links to any comments which doesn’t show if there’s no comments and same with star ratings at the bottom we have our pagination that defaults to 10 results per page and we can change that if we want to look at more up to 50 we can move through our pages we can also go right to the end of our results and right back to the beginning of our results when we do a search if there are results we have highlighted in the title and the description matching results but if there are also results in the attachments we get this little magnifying glass icon next to the attachment icon which tells us that somewhere in those attachments there is a matching result if we had a bunch of filters set and i’ll just use an example i’ll just pick a collection and we’ve got our search criteria in here and i decide i want to do a fresh search and clear all filters and all search criteria i can use this new search button and that will clear all filters ready for a fresh search we also have the sort option visible in the search results panel at all times so at an institution level this is set to relevance in this particular example i can go and change that to a different sort order if i wish and we can see it there all the time additionally if i have a search set up and i might have a number of different filters set with that i can use this copy search link to clipboard which will copy the url including all the filters that are set and any search criteria entered and when i paste that into another browser or i could email it to somebody else and they paste it in a browser it will show the same search with filters intact now let’s have a look at our refined search panel so i touched on the collection selector and so we have a selector now which will allow multiple selections so i can actually search in two or more actually a single one as well uh collection and um i can see when i click away from there i can see what i’m searching in and i can use the down arrow to look at any extra ones that i can’t see there i can remove one if i want to and i can clear all of them using this clear button we can also search in our collections now so which is great for people who have many many collections we can find them very easily you can search for another one etc our access advanced searches drop down allows us to look at our advanced searches and then click on the ones that we want in 2020.
2 when we click on an advanced search it will actually open the legacy search page because the new material ui technologies have not yet been applied to the advanced search page but they will be in a future release the refined search panel also has a show more link to open up more filters and in a similar way to the access advanced searches we have access remote repositories and again if we click on one of them it will take us to the legacy search page we have our date modified filter and we have some predefined ranges in here that we can pick from there are quick options we can also use exact dates so we have our from and to dates and i can pick a from date and it will show me only those items that have been edited since that date until today’s date similarly if i clear that and put only a to date in so i might go back a few months it will show me only those that have been edited prior to the date i have in the to date and of course we could put in a date range to only show those between those two dates we do have a new option in settings that will allow administrators to hide this date modified filter if they don’t think it’s relevant for their users and that also applies to the owner filter so there is an option to not display the owner filter in the refine search panel too so our owner filter is very similar to the one that we had in the legacy ui just looks prettier so we can search for users and select a user and it will show that user in the refined search panel and we have the bin to delete if we close that or use the show less button and we have a filter set we get this icon here this filter icon to indicate that we do have a filter set and then we have our status filter now this one will only show if at an institution level the administrators have allowed um items that have a status other than live to be searched so if i click all on that filter it will show me not only live results but if i have moderation items or items in moderation or deleted items or items in review it will show all of them rather than just live items we also have search attachments and if we say no it when we put in search terms it won’t look in attachments for matches so we can show less there and just keep the refined search panels more we also have our classifications panel and i have a separate video that you might like to watch that talks about classifications and their configuration to learn more about openequella please contact info@edalex.
com.