ETS Strategic Initiatives

ETS actively participates in a number of strategic initiatives:

OpenCast Matterhorn 1.0

Opencast Matterhorn is scheduled to launch in July 2010 as the first community source webcast/podcast system designed by higher education institutions for higher education institutions. 

Opencast Matterhorn will offer the first open source end-to-end podcasting application that supports scheduling, capture, encoding, and media and metadata delivery to multiple open distribution channels such as YouTube, iTunes, as well as local websites, thus providing an alternative to manual and time-consuming processes of video processing and distribution. As a result, the quantity and breadth of high quality academic video and audio content will be deeply expanded.

Matterhorn 1.0 development is supported by $1.3 million in grants to UC Berkeley/ETS from the William and Flora Hewlett and Andrew W. Mellon foundations as well as contributions from 12 partner institutions in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Website: http://www.opencastproject.org/homepage

Sakai 3.0

ETS is an active contributor to Sakai, the open source enterprise Collaboration and Learning Environment, branded as bSpace on the Berkeley campus. Originally developed in 2004, the current version of Sakai is functionally and technically, nearing the end of its current lifecycle. Sakai 3.0 will be developed using a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), which has the potential to greatly improve the manner in which Sakai consumes and shares data with other core SOA systems under development such as Kuali Student.

The initial Sakai 3.0 release is scheduled to be delivered for review by summer of 2010, with a complete, production-ready, enterprise version to be launched by 2011. Website: http://sakaiproject.org/portal

Fluid - Flexible User Interface Design

ETS was one of the founding members and sub-awardees of Fluid Academic, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and led by the University of Toronto ATRC (AdaptiveTechnology Resource Centre). Fluid builds user interfaces, designs commonly used interactions, teaches others how to build good user-centred designs, and works with other software projects to integrate UI solutions into their applications. Developers can freely download and use Fluid components. Website: http://fluidproject.org/