| OERu Technology Blog

The Open Education Resource universitas (OERu) is an open organisation from top to bottom. Our entire technological infrastructure (with a couple exceptions) is built with and on Free and Open Source Software to which I normally refer as "FOSS". This introductory post outlines our technological motivations and some of our key choices. Future blog posts will go into more depth on some of these choices, and provide more insight in to specific implementations.

A sample of the NextCloud photo gallery app, which converts images and other media stored in your NextCloud system into browsable, shareable image galleries, with lots of other bells and whistles.

This is yet another update of my previous posts (installing NextCloud with Collabora Office Online on Ubuntu 16.04 and then NextCloud with OnlyOffice on Ubuntu 18.04 and Install NextCloud Hub and OnlyOffice on Ubuntu 22.04 with Docker Compose). NextCloud continues to develop at a blistering rate, and as of this writing, it's at version 30.0.5.

It's been over a year since my last update - not too much has changed as far as our technology stack goes, although other aspects of our situation have been rather more volatile.

In recent months, as we wait for the prolonged controversy affecting our shareholder to settle down, at the OER Foundation we've had the opportunity to focus on consolidating our position.

Example of the user 'dashboard' of available applications to log into after authenticating into the Authentik system. The array of available services will vary depending on the groups in which the autheticated user has been included.

The OER Foundation offers many Free and Open Source Software services to our learners and educators to provide them with resources for learning, developing Open Educational Resources (OER), and collaborating - both professionally and socially - with one another. Due to this proliferation of 'point source' technologies, users have to create a myriad of user accounts, each requesting an email and password and perhaps a user name.

Any reader of this site will notice that we often talk about 'Free and Open Source Software' which we usually abbreviate as FOSS. For those who aren't intimately familiar with the history, trajectory, and nuances (warning - they are big topics) of the Free Software and Open Source Software camps - both subsets of information technology, itself a subset of digital technology - its significance is both arcane and something of a barrier to understanding.

Tips for this tutorial
Create a Virtual Private Server
- VPS Properties:
Key variables for you VPS
- Get your Domain lined up
Editing files

The user 'dashboard' view of NextCloud with user-specific content designed to indicate recent, timely, or important content for the user looking at it.

'''Update 2025-02-03:''' Here's a new tutorial for Ubuntu 24.04 and NextCloud 30! Consider this older tutorial obsolete (but possibly helpful for people with older systems).

It's been about six months since my last update and, wow, a lot has changed. The OER Foundation (OERF) has embarked on a new initiative inspired by our old friend the Fediverse and the ramifications to on our sustainability thanks to our newer nemesis, Covid19: the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Digital Learning Ecosystem (DLE).

A look at the front page of a (nearly) new Mastodon Instance with the default 'dark' theme. In this case, it's https://social.fossdle.org...

In the past week or two, with Elon Musk completing his purchase and take-over of Twitter, there has been a torrent of defections from the centralised, closed, for-profit platform to its antithesis, the Fediverse - it's a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".