Etudes Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the following organizations that have contributed to the Etudes Project.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation makes grants to address the most serious social, educational, and environmental problems in society. The Foundation places a high value on sustaining and improving institutions that make positive contributions to society. The generous support of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation enabled Etudes to achieve its development and implementation goals for Etudes-NG / Sakai to meet the needs of California Community Colleges.

The California Community College System provided educational, vocational and transfer programs to more than 2.5 million students during academic year 2005-2006. Constituting the largest system of higher education in the world, the California Community College System is currently comprised of 72 districts, 109 campuses. Etudes is grateful for the generous funding support for software development from the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office.

Sakai is an online Collaboration and Learning Environment. Etudes has deployed Sakai and is building upon it (Etudes-Next Generation) to support teaching, learning, and collaboration. We are grateful to the Sakai developer community for their responsiveness to our users' requests and fixes to issues.

JForum is a powerful and robust discussion board system implemented in Java^tm. Its clean design and implementation has made it possible to customize, extend, and integrate JForum for Etudes-NG / Sakai. We are thankful to Rafael Steil, developer of JForum, for making it freely available under the BSD Open Source license.

Atlassian, an innovative Australian software company providing enterprise software solutions to the world's leading organizations, supports the Etudes development effort by contributing JIRA, their bug tracking application.

As the first community college in California to offer online classes, Foothill College has pioneered online instruction and now offers more online courses and complete online degree programs than any other Bay Area community college. Foothill pioneered the use of online courseware with Etudes Classic, a home-grown system developed by Michael Loceff.

The De Anza Data Center provides technical services and a reliable infrastructure for programs of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District. We are grateful to Tom Roza, Director, and his team, for hosting the Etudes QA testing servers in their facilities.