Using Apus's Competitive Advantage To Community Colleges, State University

As competitors continue to enter the online higher education marketplace, APUS has to work hard to gain a competitive advantage over community colleges, state universities, and other for profit institutions. APUS has been able to maintain their competitive advantage by leveraging the open source concept of the Sakai LMS to save money, scale with rapid growth, and provide a diversified product offering to students. Sakai currently provides a full suite of educational features and services but to maintain their use of cutting edge technology, APUS should look to begin adding virtual reality content into the academic lesson plans.
Server-Side Hardware Requirements
One big advantage that open source software provides over proprietary software

The Network Effect concept is often applied to social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook but it also applies to sites like Amazon. Network Effects are great for business but foundation of Network Effects is scalability and scalability in the Information Technology world, scalability requires hardware and software. APUS’s student body grew rapidly during after the 2008 recession and Sakai was able to scale from ~25,000 students in 2007 to over 77,000 students in 2010 (US Senate, 2012). The scalability provided by leveraging the Sakai classroom or ‘Site’ setup, allowed APUS to gain a competitive advantage over other higher education universities and gain a 17% market share over the same three year time period above (US Senate,

Companies like Grammarly and EssayDog offer proof reading services that not only spell check but also offer plagiarism checking, grammar check, word analysis, and many other services aimed at improving your writing. APUS should take advantage of the improved technology and integrate a next generation writing assistant into the Sakai text box. The feature would be added to the existing text box and service would react in real time as the spell check does now. The service will allow students to check their plagiarism score BEFORE submitting. Allowing students to address unintentional similarities before grading