Accelerate your Higher Ed Institute's Online Growth with OpenEDU

Introducing OpenEDU

OpenEDU is a flexible content management framework developed by ImageX Media that accelerates the development of unique and specialized higher education websites. Eschewing the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach of many higher ed website “products”, OpenEDU provides an à la carte suite of accelerators that speeds up the creation of a scalable and sustainable open source web infrastructure without compromising the unique identities of each school and department. OpenEDU can be seen in action at "Portland State University":http://www.pdx.edu/ (PSU), where the team here at ImageX worked with PSU to help rapidly deploy over 200 departmental sites on Drupal 7.

As a result of the success with PSU, OpenEDU has been further developed and is now being incorporated into a number of other higher education institutes across North America. As part of ImageX's "commitment to contribute":http://imagexmedia.com/blog/2010/3/pursuit-awesome-our-company-values, a number of features we have developed for educational and Drupal communities are now available for download on the "OpenEDU Drupal project site":http://drupal.org/project/openedu.

1. Single Sign-On Service

The first feature publicly released was the "Single Sign-On Service (SSO)":http://imagexmedia.com/blog/2012/1/services-single-sign-client. The SSO provides a single source of account authentication and credentials, allowing users to log in once across all of your institution’s websites (while individual granular control over permissions still keeps users out of sites where they shouldn't have access). If you’ve ever found yourself asking “Why do I have to have a separate account on every website?”, then you’ll be pleased to hear that the OpenEDU SSO feature is now available to download on the "OpenEDU Drupal project site":http://drupal.org/project/services_sso_client.

2. Link Block 

The "Link Block Module":http://drupal.org/project/openedu_linkblock, though very simple, can save you valuable time if you are ever in need of creating a list of links. It can help to limit some of the redundancies that are associated with copy and pasting.

3. OpenEDU Module

The "OpenEDU Module":http://drupal.org/project/openedu is the base module that allows for seamless integration with all current and upcoming OpenEDU releases.

4. Content Syndication

Content Syndication has been the cornerstone of the OpenEDU framework since its inception. This feature enables users to publish content once and re-use it across all or some of their department websites. Syndication empowers users to be able to share news, media, events and other information across their sites from one convenient location. Finally curing a common pain-point for many higher ed institutions, Syndication allows for simple content distribution to an infinite number of sites. The image below is a screenshot taken from the PSU website running OpenEDU and Content Syndication.