Illinois Turns to Open Source Framework for Statewide Portal

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 03/04/14

The state of Illinois is turning to an open source solution for its statewide education portal.

For the effort, IlliniCloud, a cloud computing consortium serving K-12 schools in Illinois, has tapped IT services provider Unicon to develop and deploy the K12 AppPortal, a tool to help Illinois school districts adopt federated applications and services.

"The K12 AppPortal is a critical building block in establishing a federated identity management system for K12 school districts in Illinois," said Jim Peterson, CTO at IlliniCloud, in a prepared statement. "The portal will serve as the central hub for applications and services, while providing a federated single sign-on experience."

Part of a larger project that seeks "to implement interfaces and implementation strategies supporting local systems and private/public cloud services" to more effectively deliver personalized learning, according to a news release, the portal will be built with the open source uPortal and will "present personalized content through applications integrated with the portal." uPortal is a project of Jasig, a consortium of colleges, universities and businesses sponsoring open source projects for education, primarily post-secondary education.