We recently received this from the people at *Research about the *Unity platform. (*Unity is another name for the Apereo Open Academic Environment)
Dear Colleague
*Unity will close down on 10 September 2018. After that you won’t be able to use it any more, so if you have any material you want to keep hold of, you need to download it before then.
We’ve taken this decision because, although *Unity was popular with many users, it wasn’t adopted by university IT departments. Without their support, we can’t make a success of it.
Our goal was to create an open platform for cooperation between academics everywhere with shared governance, so that academia could reclaim space that has been colonised by big technology players. This idea is explained here: http://oaeproject.org/2015/12/11/reintermediation.html. But, with some notable exceptions, it proved impossible to get university IT departments to buy into this vision.
An FAQ for dealing with practical issues has been posted at https://www.unity.ac/faq and you can also ask questions to support@untiy.ac. Please note that if we receive large numbers of queries it may take some time to reply.
Thank you for using *Unity and good luck with your studies.
With best wishes,
Martin Atkinson
Technology Director
*Research
