openEQUELLA gives you control, access and flexibility over your digital content on an open source platform
With openEQUELLA, your staff won’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. Free your digital content from within siloed learning management system (LMS) courses, making them accessible, able to be improved upon, repurposed for use in multiple places and shared easily across your institution.
Designed specifically to fit snugly in the education ecosystem, openEQUELLA sits in the centre of your edTech stack and acts as a ‘single source of truth’ to house your teaching and learning, research, media and library content.
openEQUELLA has been deployed for copyright resource collections, research materials, managing and exposing materials through websites and portals, content authoring, workflow, institutional policy and organisational resources.
Our clients include
“openEquella has enabled TAFE Queensland to manage its vast catalogue of learning and assessment resources, aiding continuous improvement and ensuring that our teachers have ready access to high quality and compliant learning and assessment resources. As continuing changes in the workplace, adoption of new occupational technologies and the COVID-19 global pandemic have driven the need for learners to retrain or build new skills in emerging areas, openEQUELLA has been able to seamlessly support peer and industry collaborations that will see TQ remain a leader in the sector well into the future.”
- Lee Webster, Director Learning Technology Innovation and Services at TAFE Queensland
With openEQUELLA, you can:
- Catalogue, search and find easier - organise your content in the way that best aligns with your institution’s internal processes and tag for easy discoverability. Use the powerful internal search engine to search, sort and filter to find your content fast
- Liberate your content - content is usually locked away in silos across the institution. Help your staff create, develop and improve their work quickly and easily using resources already created by their colleagues
- Manage and control - from the administration console, control and manage metadata, permissions, and overall access control
- Capture and maximise use - make sure your digital assets don’t walk out the door when staff do! Capture, edit and update content with reusability in mind
- Maintain quality - streamline data handling and maintain quality standards. Update one Master asset and push the update out to all other instances where the asset is used
- Reduce costs - consolidate down from multiple platforms to a single or only a few platforms, costing you less in licensing fees, vendor management and maintenance and reduce the duplicated time and effort of your staff at every level
- Join or participate in the content sharing economy - institutions who’ve established commercial education content arrangements can identify, control and manage access to specific content items or broad content collections in open or closed environments
“For all the vendors we deal with, I can tell you that Edalex has been one of the best - for their customer service, ease of direct access and collegiate collaboration. You just don’t get that elsewhere. Managers and their support staff are equally accessible, friendly and you can reach out direct and get an answer quickly and easily. We know that software can always be improved upon over time, but we can only have those in-depth, critical conversations that you really need to have with a vendor, thanks to the relationships we have with the Edalex team. They feel far more like a colleague than a vendor.”
- Mahbub Hassan, Senior Technology Specialist at Macquarie University
What is a digital repository, and how does it differ from other content management platforms?
At its core, a digital repository is a platform for managing and storing digital content. There are many other platforms that operate in a similar space, including enterprise content management systems (ECMS), digital asset management systems (DAMS), document management systems (DMS) and others - and they all have a slightly different area of focus.
openEQUELLA was developed by educators, for educators, with a focus on storing digital content that is used in a teaching and learning context. As users increasingly sought to store a wider variety of digital content that spanned all areas of an educational ecosystem (not just teaching and learning content), openEQUELLA evolved to become a full service digital repository, enabling it to uniquely and comprehensively meet the needs of education institutions.
How does openEQUELLA add value to our LMS?
A learning management system (LMS) is a critical component of most educational technology ecosystems, with the majority of leading LMSes providing some level of basic content management. However, at its core, an LMS is course-centric, in which access to course content is limited to those either teaching or taking a specific course.
Conversely, openEQUELLA is content-centric, with a focus on the lifecycle of the content stored within the platform: from creation, editing, new versioning, archiving etc. With a focus on the content, an institution is able to ensure content can be easily discovered, managed and then delivered to learners via the LMS, leveraging the strengths of both platforms.
As an open source platform, how does Edalex support openEQUELLA?
openEQUELLA is an open source platform under the umbrella of the Apereo Foundation. Despite its open source nature, given Edalex’s long history with the platform, Edalex is responsible for all development, documentation and testing of the openEQUELLA platform, and has openEQUELLA expertise and knowledge spanning support, technical consulting, hosting, and more. There is not a single organisation in the world with more current and historic knowledge of the platform.
Platform features that really impress
As an established open source platform, openEQUELLA sits in the centre of your edTech stack and acts as a ‘single source of truth’ to house your teaching and learning, research, media and library content. openEQUELLA has been deployed for copyright resource collections, research materials, managing and exposing materials through websites and portals, content authoring, workflow, institutional policy and organisational resources. openEQUELLA has lots of features to brag about:
- Plays well with consumer and provider systems and platforms - developed with interoperability in mind, openEQUELLA integrates seamlessly with all major LMSs and offers rich API and LTI connections for other systems or 3rd-party platforms
- Supports collections that are open, closed or both - share as much or as little as you want, with the ability to create private and public collections - increasingly desired in the emerging content sharing economy
- Quality assurance workflows and version control - for highly regulated industries, like aviation, medical, engineering and law, meet rigorous education content standards with verification, approval and version control workflows
- Highly customisable to meet your precise needs and objectives - internally, we say that openEQUELLA can be customised to within an inch of its life! This is no jest, with features like custom taxonomies, custom workflows and its flexible custom-reporting engine
“At Swinburne Commons, we often feel that we’re not doing what everyone else is, so the flexibility that openEQUELLA provides us means that we can achieve our vision precisely, rather than have to fit in with pre-configured settings or templates. Having worked with the Edalex team from the start, we’ve enjoyed a level of support and access that’s uncommon these days. Rather than getting lost in a nameless system, Edalex are responsive in support and inclusive in development discussions. We’d recommend openEQUELLA’s highly configurable design to any institution with a clear vision, looking for a customisable digital repository solution to help them achieve it.”
- Anton Proppe, Manager, Library Discovery at Swinburne University of Technology
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