OnlineScholar

While many institutions use either OpenScholar, Drupal or WordPress-based software, there was a need for a simpler, effective, inexpensive and safer way to enable faculty content with institutionnal consistency, control and support and a wide variety of device support.

Faculty will enjoy the ease with which they can create content, particularly those in STEM who are right at home with the LaTeX-styled equation support using the popular ASCIIdoc markup language, and instantly see the results as they type.

Users will create pages within minutes. Content is automatically branded by the institution or can be included in your content management system (CMS) through hooks described below.

The scholars create content, the institution brands it and markets it.

OnlineScholar uses ASCIIdoc and CSS for all content. The CSS can be redefined or extended by the local IT team and quickly deployed to users. Create or even change your themes and all pages are rendered accordingly.

LaTeX-styled math is rendered through open source MathJax and displayed as SVG, while accessible math content is also available through MathML for those with assistive needs.

Accessible content is a theme throughout the system.

Users can easily add managed content such as PNG and JPEG images, PDF papers, Bibtex and other files associated with web pages.

Video content on YouTube, Vimeo and others are also supported.

What OnlineScholar does, it does very well.

Its somewhat-limited options prevents users from making coding mistakes or accessibility issues on your public web sites, problems that invariably get introduced with user-created Forms, JavaScript and interactive content.

Some faculty will insist on private web sites with total control, but for those who simply wish to have content creation options, OnlineScholar does what is needed.

The OnlineScholar system is evolving with new functionality and options being added rapidly. Suggestions are welcomed.

OnlineScholar offers an export feature which allows its content to be referenced by other CMS systems. It will automatically re-base all HTML links and content to a desired URL base within your CMS so one can pass-through the CMS to OnlineScholar.

The system is integrated with Active Directory or LDAP servers for mass account activations. SAML or OIDC are used for enterprise-level authentication. It is enterprise ready.

A popular new feature is the built-in AI assistant. When clicked, it reviews and offers suggestions regarding user text. This is available at no additional software charges, but requires access to a computer with NVIDA CUDE support, either locally hosted on accessible over the network.

Licensing is very affordable at less than 1/10 the cost of some alternatives like OpenScholar, and can be made available to all academic and non-academic staff, as well as interns, grads, or even undergrads.

Intial setup takes one day for sites with existing SAML or OIDC installations.

Onine documentation, full written and maintained with OnlineScholar, is easily modified by the institution as desired.

The vast majority of your academics' needs can be satisified with this system. While we recognize a few will need to create forms and more dynamic content than currently allowed, we note tha no one system will satisify all users because every system imposing some sense or order will have limitations on some users creativity.

For more details, contact Erick Engelke.

For an example site, see: uwaterloo’s installation;