Don't think that the introduction of quarantine was an opening for hacking educational institutions. Hacker attacks began long before the COVID-19 pandemic and the mass shift to online learning. A year ago, the school district in San Bernardino, California, became the target of ransomware attacks. According to Tessian, the University of Utah and the University of California paid ransom payments of $457,000 and $114,000 respectively to gain access to their systems.
Secondary education institutions (below the college level) are the most vulnerable to hacking. Cyberattacks on schools are cheap for criminals, but it can cost the schools themselves millions of dollars to prevent or recover from them. School districts simply do not have the resources, both financial and human, to handle such attacks.
“We’re basically building the Jetpack for Higher Ed,” said Blake Bertuccelli as he pitched me on the idea of Edupack, a project still in its early stages.
He and his team are looking for more advisors to join the eighth round of their once-monthly braintrust events. It is a project they began in November 2020, now coming to fruition. Feedback is crucial to pushing such undertakings out of the gate, and the team needs more of it.
Bertuccelli listed several focal points for the Edupack project:
Onboarding: New campus users can set up a beautiful campus WordPress site with a few clicks.
Archiving: Stale sites are automatically archived to save campus resources.
Reporting: Accessibility, plagiarism, and resource usage can be accessed from the Edupack dashboard.
Brand and Content Management: Approved Higher Ed content patterns and universal brand controls keep sites beautiful and consistent.
Configuration Management: Cloud-controlled configuration settings means admins can control millions of sites from one place.
Onboarding form with Tulane-branded elements.
“Our onboarding form offers pre-built sites for users to start from,” said Bertuccelli. “So, if a scientist needs a new site for their lab, the scientist can select a pre-built lab site from our onboarding form then add in their unique content.”
Bertuccelli is Edupack’s CEO. He called himself a “forever learner” and is currently reading A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell.
“I paid for my Tulane education by coding WordPress themes,” said Bertuccelli. “After college, I founded one of New Orleans’ first WordPress dev shops (Decubing). A year ago, I presented on building a self-publishing platform with Multisite at WP Campus. The feedback was phenomenal, and two blokes from Birmingham offered to work on a plugin with me. A few months later, we launched Edupack’s MVP. Since then, folks from Harvard, Dartmouth, and about 17 other universities have been working with us to make WordPress an even better CMS for Higher Ed pros.”
The “two blokes” he is referring to are his co-founders, Nathan Monk and Matt Lees. They run a WordPress shop called SMILE. Monk is serving as Edupack’s CTO. Lees is the Chief Creative Officer — Bertuccelli called him “Lord of the UX.” Altogether, the three co-founders have over 30 years of experience working with Higher Ed and WordPress.
The Edupack team is making accessible content a priority, which is a primary issue for Higher Ed. The goal is to offer A11Y reports inside of the WordPress dashboard and tie them into publishing workflows. This would notify users of errors as they publish content.
“Our accessibility reports tie into another feature we are launching this month: site archiving,” said Bertuccelli. “Campus users graduate and often forget about their sites. Edupack sends a notification to a user if the site hasn’t been accessed, then adds an “archived” meta value to the site that super administrators can take action from.
Setting up automated archiving.
“Devs often recode thousands of sites to add new Campus branding,” said Bertuccelli on the reasons behind Edupack. “Department budgets are drained on resources for stale sites. Institutions are sued over inaccessible content or misused branding.
“Edupack intends to automate website management so that Higher Ed pros can focus on supporting education.”
The following video is an introduction to Edupack:
Join the Braintrust Session
Every third Wednesday of each month, Edupack holds a “Braintrust” event. Bertuccelli says it is the best way to get involved. The session lasts for an hour over a Zoom video chat. The next event is scheduled for July 21, 10 am – 11 am (CDT).
Each session focuses on a single question. Next week’s question: “How can we enhance WordPress blocks for Higher Ed?”
“We’ll demo Edupack updates, brainstorm solutions for block enhancements, then wrap up with action steps for us to do by next month,” said Bertuccelli. “Folks who manage WordPress sites for global institutions and companies have attended our last seven braintrusts. Any Higher Ed pro is welcome!”
Those interested can also keep track of progress via the Edupack blog.
Pricing and the Future
There is currently no publicly available pricing list. The project’s FAQs page says the team is still tuning the costs, and Bertuccelli remained quiet on any hard numbers.
“Community colleges can’t afford tech used by bigger schools,” he said. “That’s not fair. Edupack will be priced so that every institution can afford the service. We haven’t thought about pricing beyond that.”
Universities that wish to get check out the project should schedule a demo from the site’s homepage.
Edupack has around 20 institutions serving as development partners and guiding the roadmap. The team invites new schools to join every few months. Currently, Tulane and the University of Gloucestershire are using Edupack. Harvard and Dartmouth should be next.
The service is limited to universities and colleges at the moment. However, the team would eventually like to expand across the education sector. After that, we will have to see.
“Edupack’s features can be applied to any industry where users run lots of sites,” said Bertuccelli. “I could see ad agencies using Edupack, hosting companies integrating our tools, and School Districts running their site network via Edupack and WordPress.”
A new report from eQAfy, a company that collects and analyzes data about higher education websites, has benchmarked which content management systems US institutions are using. The report is a snapshot of data from December 2020, sourced from the National Center for Education StatisticsIPEDS database. After scanning a list of 4,000 active institutions, EQAfy’s headless browser was able to detect the CMS for 3,359 homepages (83.8%).
A market leading group of 12 content management systems made up 90% of the homepages eQAfy detected, including four open source solutions and eight proprietary solutions. WordPress captures 40.8% of the market, followed by Drupal at 19.1%, as measured across all institution types (public, private for profit, and private non-profit), levels (2-year and 4-year), and sizes.
WordPress’ estimated market share for public institutions came in at 27%, and is much higher in the private for-profit institutions category at 55%.
Looking at 2-year public higher education institutions by student population, WordPress falls to #3 at just 18.3%. Drupal leads the pack in that category with 29.2%, and proprietary CMS’s take up the rest of the market. WordPress does much better in the category of 4-year private for-profit higher education institutions, capturing a staggering 75% of the market.
When examining CMS suppliers for institutions by size, WordPress is the overall market leader but does far better in the smallest institutional size categories, with waning dominance in the large to very large categories.
The report has more interesting data comparisons across different categories if you want to dig deeper. It’s important to note that eQAfy only collected the main websites for these institutions, which may not be representative of the CMS that powers the schools’ ancillary websites. They are often created using a combination of platforms. This report covers only which CMS the schools preferred to use for the face of their institutions.
Artificial intelligence is one of the most significant pieces of technology to emerge in the 21st Century. Today, it’s never more than a few meters away — whether you’re at home watching Netflix or in your car on the way to work.
It’s hard not to think of an industry that isn’t ripe for technological innovation — especially when it comes to the delicate and vital topics of healthcare and education.
