Rob van Leeuwen, Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam
June 10-15, 2012
Growing Community;
Growing Possibilities
What to expect
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Rob van Leeuwen
Educational technologist
Working on online collaboration, digital
assessments, VLE’s, online lectures
@robvl on Twitter
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This short clip gives an impression of our
university:SURFconext / Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam pilot (in Dutch)
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NextVLE VU, 2008: Sakai a possible VLE for
VU?
Sakai CLE, OSP for a small number of
students
◦ hosted solution
◦ community source
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Running OAE
since January 2012
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“The Facebook professor”
Awarded best teacher of the year
Uses social media like Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube
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Dr Mooi in his office
Wolter Mooi at TEDX Maastricht (in English)
Interview at TEDX, in English
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Collaboration with the other Amsterdam
university (www.english.uva.nl)
Possibly Blackboard’s successor as VLE, full
reports in English @ Next VLE VU
Collaboration environment
OER
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Free and online educational material for all
medical undergraduates in the Netherlands +
Flanders
Why?
◦ Give students as much material as possible
◦ They should be encouraged to ask and answer
questions
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How?
◦ OAE in hybrid mode
◦ SURFconext
◦ Tons of online open educational resources
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SURF is the Dutch NREN, National Research
and Education Network
SURFconext is infrastructural glue
Information on SURFconext, in English
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SURFconext, more information in English
SURFconext components available as open
source
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The SURFConext architecture makes use of SAML 2.0 protocol for Identity
Provisioning and OpenSocial extended by the VOOT protocol for the provisioning of
groups, memberships and roles. To connect the open.vu.nl instance to the
SURFConext architecture, the existing SAML authentication module needed to be
modified and extended on the following parts.
 The library needed to be upgraded to support the SAML 2.0 protocol. This is done
by making use of the oiosaml library. Most obvious changes are made in the way
the client browser is being sent do the IdP by the SAML authentication module.
 The SURFConext attribute mapping uses multiple mappings for the same field. For
example, the mail attribute can be send as URN (urn:mace:dir:attribute-def:mail)
or OID (urn:oid:0.9.2342.19200300.100.1.3). To make the
SAML authentication module more flexible, the module is modified to support
multiple attribute fields for the same property of the Sakai user.
 The VU Identity provider does not send the first name in case of most employees.
To map the first name field, it needs to be extracted from the full name field.
Modifications to the code have been made to support this.
 All these modifications are done as part of the Sakai OAE explorations of the VU.
The SAML 2.0 upgrade took about 13 hrs, the multiple attribute mapping took
about 5 hours, the first name problem took about 2 hrs but is not completely
resolved for now.
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The first two modifications can be of use for the Sakai Community. The
modifications made are considered to be experimental.
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Free and online educational material for all
medical undergraduates in the Netherlands +
Flanders
How?
◦ OAE in hybrid mode
◦ SURFconext
◦ Tons of online open educational resources
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