Hi everyone,
The following Press Release [1] has just been made available by the Apereo
Foundation and Marist College. It provides an interesting and exciting use case
for Apereo OAE usage and we'll definitely continue to report updates on how
this is playing out.
---------------------------------------
Marist College launches The FOLD at NY Fashion Week Using Open-Source Software
from the Apereo Foundation
Online learning gets fashionable! First-of-its-kind, student-driven online
collaborative learning environment for all things fashion launches at
MaristXOXBetsey show, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week collaboration between Marist
and design icon Betsey Johnson
PRLog (Press Release) - Feb. 14, 2014 - NEW YORK -- Marist College has extended
its leadership in educational technology with the launch of The FOLD, a
student-driven, collaborative online learning resource for all things fashion,
which is leveraging the power of two Apereo Foundation projects, Sakai and the
Open Academic Environment (OAE), as part of the institution’s strategic
Academic Community Cloud initiative.
“Marist has been a leader in distance education for over a decade, yet we are
constantly challenging ourselves to innovate these programs,” said Bill Thirsk,
Marist Vice President of Information Technology and CIO. “We believe that the
Academic Community Cloud concept will allow us to take the next major
evolutionary step forward in online learning by going beyond providing a
platform for outstanding courses, which Sakai has given us for many years, to
bringing our entire academic community of scholars, educators, and students
online, as well.”
The Academic Community Cloud (ACC), which is being piloted by a number of the
college’s Centers of Excellence -- including fashion, enterprise computing, and
the Ray Rich Leadership Institute -- uses the Sakai open-source learning
management system to support a range of formal online learning experiences,
from small seminars to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). At the same time,
the ACC is leveraging the Open Academic Environment (OAE) to support more
informal academic collaboration of the sort that has traditionally taken place
on campus (e.g. research teams, student organizations, study groups, etc.), but
which has been largely absent from online learning programs.
“The ability for users of OAE to control whether content and interactions are
shared with just their group, the entire institution, across institutions, or
even with the world is extremely powerful from a community building and
collaboration perspective,” said Josh Baron, Marist Senior Academic Technology
Officer and member of the Apereo Foundation Board of Directors. “The FOLD
(Fashion Online Learning Domain) is a great example of how this new ability to
support academic collaboration at a global scale is allowing Marist students to
gain real world learning experiences through engagement with their peers,
professionals, and scholars in the fashion industry.”
With The FOLD, Marist’s renowned Fashion Program is taking full advantage of
the college’s leading-edge technology platform and recognized expertise in
academic technology to provide to students around the world interested in all
facets of the fashion industry:
A student-driven, academic fashion community available to anyone anywhere
Free online mini-courses for the fashion-minded student or professional
The first peer-to-peer online course about fashion trend forecasting “developed
by students for students”
Insider’s view on everything Fashion at Marist and far beyond
The FOLD builds on earlier pilots that were implemented last semester as part
of the “Fashion in the Cloud” course taught by Radley Cramer, Director of the
Marist Fashion Program, and Melissa Halvorson, a Professional Lecturer in the
Fashion Program. As part of this course, students studying abroad used OAE to
share photos of street trends they were observing around the world and then
engage in a global dialog about them. “It was thrilling to see our fashion
students using OAE to engage in the real world experience of observing,
recording, and sharing street trends from Hong Kong, London, Paris, and New
York,” said Cramer. “Given the success of this initial pilot, we are
tremendously excited about the launch of The FOLD and the chance to scale up
this work.”
To see examples of the street trends students identify using OAE from the fall
course go to [2].
Explore what’s to come and register to participate at [3].
About Marist
Located in New York State’s historic Hudson River Valley, with a branch campus
in Florence, Italy, extension centers throughout New York, and educational
offerings around the world through its online programs, Marist College is a
comprehensive, independent institution grounded in the liberal arts. Marist
educates 5,900 students in 44 undergraduate majors and 12 graduate programs,
including fully online MBA, MPA, MS, and MA degrees and is recognized for
excellence by U.S. News & World Report, The Princeton Review, and Kiplinger’s
Personal Finance.
About the Apereo Foundation
The Apereo Foundation [4] was formed by the merger of Jasig [5] and the Sakai
[6] Foundation in late December 2012. Sakai and Jasig had been pioneers in the
production and adoption of open source software for higher education for over
ten years. Apereo will take that work further, providing a more rational and
improved organizational umbrella for a range of projects and software
communities serving higher education. The core mission of the Foundation -- to
"assist and facilitate educational organizations which collaborate to foster,
develop, and sustain open technologies and innovation to support learning,
teaching, and research" -- is discussed, along with the rationale for the
merger, in more detail in the white paper “The Value of a Common Foundation:
The Case for Apereo [7]”.
About the Open Academic Environment (OAE) Project
The Open Academic Environment (OAE) supports learning and scholarship above the
institutional layer by facilitating networks of content, people, and their
collaborative activities. The open-source project partners currently include
University of Cambridge, Georgia Institute of Technology, Marist College, ESUP
Portail Consortium and Research Professional. A project overview and blog can
be found at [8].
[1]
http://www.prlog.org/12282908-marist-college-launches-the-fold-at-ny-fashion-week-using-open-source-software-from-the-apereo-foundation.html
[2] https://thefold.oaeproject.org/search/street%20trend?types=group
[3] https://thefold.marist.edu
[4] http://www.apereo.org
[5] http://www.jasig.org
[6] http://www.sakaiproject.org
[7] http://www.apereo.org/value
[8] http://www.oaeproject.org
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