How Elentra at Queen's University uses GitHub

Queen's University created the Elentra Consortium to transform medical education through a flexible, collaborative platform built on GitHub. What began as a curriculum management system for the university's medical school evolved into a software consortium serving more than 20 universities across the US, Canada, and Singapore.

Building a Collaborative Platform

For more than 175 years, Queen's University has been educating researchers and scholars known for excellence across disciplines. When the university set out to create an integrated online learning experience for its medical school, leadership recognized the challenge ahead. "The requirements within medical education and education in general change very, very quickly," said Matt Simpson, Associate Director of the Elentra Consortium. "We knew we would have to build a flexible platform to meet our own needs and, in doing so, we created a solution that met the needs of many other schools."

The project initially started as a curriculum management system to map curricular content and provide learners access to resources. When another Canadian university approached Queen's about using the product, the university faced a choice: commercialize it or build a community around it. "Ultimately, we decided to do both," Simpson said. Rather than simply sharing source code, Queen's University created a software consortium where participating schools could use and contribute to the code as community source software, while also offering a separate fully managed cloud-based commercial option.

From SVN to GitHub

When the collaboration initiative began in 2008, developers used Apache Subversion (SVN) to track and manage code changes. As the consortium grew, the need for better visibility and a community-centric platform became clear. The university migrated the consortium's code from SVN to Git for version control, and ultimately to GitHub.

"Developers gravitate towards GitHub," Simpson said. "It has the visibility and community already established which made our developers immediately comfortable with using the system."

Today, the Elentra Consortium includes 10 repositories, three main products, two shared libraries, and a team of over 100 developers across more than 20 participating universities.

Institutional Forks and Collaborative Development

Using GitHub, universities can easily fork the existing core software and build on top of it or modify it to meet their needs. Queen's asks consortium participants to create what they call an "institutional fork"—a copy of a GitHub repository that allows them to freely experiment with code. Each university can make changes without impacting the original code, and when they build something the community can use, they can contribute it back to the original repository.

Universities can also collaborate with other schools in the consortium. "Schools are often experts on a particular feature for a certain amount of time. Then faculty members or developers move on or institutional priorities shift, and no one remains to take it up," Simpson said. The consortium model solves that problem by distributing expertise and resources across institutions.

The typical workflow involves one university developing a new feature based on stakeholder requirements and feedback. The Elentra Consortium core team then conducts code review, QA, and security analysis before merging into the final product. Often, one or two developers from multiple universities work on the same feature simultaneously. "If a school doesn't have significant resources available to work on a bigger feature, they can team up with other universities. This allows them to build something they would otherwise have to buy," Simpson explained.

Streamlining Development with GitHub Integrations

Queen's University leverages integrations with GitHub to streamline project management. The university uses an integration between GitHub and Jira to manage issues and project planning. When a developer creates a pull request or mentions an issue number in a commit, it immediately appears in Jira. Developers can create an issue number branch, push their bug fix or feature, and submit a pull request back to the core repository.

For continuous integration testing, Queen's University recently switched from Travis CI to GitHub Actions. "I liked Travis CI, it was fantastic. However, it was an expensive service for us. GitHub released Actions and it does everything so elegantly within the tool we already rely upon," Simpson said. When a pull request is created, the university uses Actions with built-in CI/CD to run unit tests, dependency verification, and code linting. "I'm very grateful for the fact that there are so many pre-existing actions in the Marketplace," Simpson added. The move to Actions saves the university money while allowing them to invest in other priorities, including better security for their software.

The Future of Collaborative Development

Today, Queen's University sees GitHub as central to its collaborative software development process. "Without GitHub, we wouldn't have our consortium edition repositories or all of the institutional forks that make this project possible," Simpson said.