Apereo Reports Significant Donation to Open Source for Education

PRINCETON, N.J. - July 6, 2020 - PRLog -- The Apereo Foundation today announced receipt of a major donation to support and sustain open source software in education. The donation of $75,000 USD will be divided between the Apereo Open Academic Environment, an academic collaboration environment with widespread adoption in France, the Apereo Foundation itself and Sakai, a leading open source LMS.

Dr. Charles Severance, in making the donation, said, "I feel that Apereo and Open Source in Education are very important and adding my financial support to these efforts reflects what I see as the future value of the Apereo work." Ian Dolphin, Executive Director of the Apereo Foundation, which stewards sixteen open source academic offerings added, "In the current climate, the free license model of open source software allows flexibility, scalability and choice for Higher Education. Open source software provides affordances for innovation enabling Higher Education Institutions to tailor solutions to their needs. Dr. Severance's significant donation will strengthen existing work and enable us to reach new constituencies at a critical time."

Dr. Severance will become a key stakeholder in the Open Academic Environment, joining a group of representatives of French Higher Education.

About Dr. Charles R. Severance
Charles is a Clinical Professor and teaches in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He is the Chair of the Sakai Project Management Committee (PMC). Previously he was the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation and the Chief Architect of the Sakai Project and worked with the IMS Global Learning Consortium promoting and developing standards for teaching and learning technology. He is the host of the www.learnerprivacy.org podcast.

Charles teaches 21 popular MOOCs and three specializations to students worldwide on the Coursera, edX, and FutureLearn platforms, and is a long-time advocate of open educational resources to empower teachers and students.

Charles was the editor of the Computing Conversations column in IEEE Computer magazine from 2011-2017 that features a monthly article and video interview of a computing pioneer. Charles is the author of several books including: Python for Everybody, Sakai: Building an Open Source Community, Using Google App Engine from O'Reilly and Associates, and the O'Reilly book titled High Performance Computing. Charles has a background in standards including serving as the vice-chair for the IEEE Posix P1003 standards effort and edited the Standards Column in IEEE Computer Magazine from 1995-1999.

Charles has a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Michigan State University.

About Apereo
The Apereo Foundation exists to help educational institutions collaborate to develop, use and sustain open source software for learning, teaching and research. It is a membership organization, with members on four continents. Membership ranges from community colleges to major research-intensive institutions. Apereo currently supports sixteen software solutions, which are listed at www.apereo.org. The Apereo Foundation is a non-profit corporation registered in New Jersey.

About Sakai
Sakai represents a fundamentally different approach to the learning management system. Unlike other "open" systems available today, the direction and feature set of Sakai originates from within higher education to address the dynamic needs of a global academic community. The Sakai open-source community energetically and nimbly advances the Sakai platform, as educators and developers from various institutions together turn great ideas into exciting possibilities for faculty teaching and student learning. https://www.sakailms.org/

About the Open Academic Environment
The Apereo Open Academic Environment is a modern way for academics and others to collaborate within and across institutions. It integrates with a number of authentication approaches, and is used by 18 Higher Education institutions and projects in France. http://oaeproject.org/