OpenAcademic is moving along nicely - Bill (FunnyMonkey) has been doing a great job of conceptualizing his thoughts and ideas. These will shortly make their way onto this site. We are ready to ramp the project up, Ben (Technical director of Elgg) is now working full-time on Elgg related projects, this included, which is great - it means we can start to make this vision a reality.

It looks like the OpenID piece is working well on the Drupal side, now we just need to get Elgg OpenID enabled and we can begin to piece together the systems, see what we have, what still needs to be built etc.

Although we have not launched or even announced OpenAcademic, the project is getting some attention from interested individuals, which is great and bodes well for the future.

What next?

We are looking to get this site into an acceptable shape to launch - we are continuing to build out the required integrations and are working on use cases/scenarios to help those interested in this approach find out more and explore how OpenAcademic might be able to help them. Exciting times ahead!

I am very excited about the prospects of this new project. OpenAcademic is a new company with the sole aim of provide open source learning solutions which are:

• Flexible in meeting student needs
• Flexible in meeting the needs of teacher
• Flexible in meeting institutional needs

To achieve these goals we approach things from an end users prospective - you should never need to bend your requirements and needs to fit the software you are using - it should be the other around, the software should work for you.

OpenAcademic takes advantage of some of the best Open Source educational tools available; Moodle, and Elgg as well as the excellent OpenID to glue it all together.

This is an organic project, we will be learning as we go along and are actively encouraging people to get involved. So, if you are a developer, and educator with a passion for online learning tools and environments or just someone who has a passion for this area, please get in touch.