Michael Feldstein has written an excellent article about the Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) – you may know this better as Sakai OAE or Sakai 3. (When the Sakai Foundation and JA SIG merged, they formed a new organisation called Apereo. Oxford is a member of the Apereo Foundation.)
After a number of years in the wilderness, it would appear that OAE is finally getting close to delivering a promised new generation of learning platform. Read the article in full at: http://mfeldstein.com/the-death-and-rebirth-of-sakai-oae/.
OAE, the development of which is led by Cambridge University, is very different from WebLearn as it is based on social networking principle: the sharing, co-editing, discovery and commenting upon content is central to the environment. It is very good for discovering other people with similar academic interests, forming groups of such individuals and discovering content that is relevant to the group. This kind of networking could extend to other institutions who also run OAE (such as Cambridge). The idea is that OAE will run alongside a systems such as WebLearn, it is not striving to provide the same functionality but is intending to complement it.
OAE definitely has synergy with a recent OXTALENT winner: the Said Business School’s GOTO platform which provides students and alumni with a collaborative environment that supports learning, discovery and problem solving.
See more about Apereo OAE at:
- Demo of OAE – definitely worth it!
- State of the project – comprehensive but a little long!
See more about GOTO at:
Please let us now if you find OAE an interesting prospect, it would be useful to be able to gauge what sort of interest there is at Oxford.
