We are pleased to announce a special seminar about the Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) presented by our friends from CARET (Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies) at Cambridge University. The talk will take place in ISIS room, IT Services, Banbury Rd at 12.30 on Thursday April 3rd. Please visit the following URL to reserve a space: https://courses.it.ox.ac.uk/detail/OUOU
Apereo OAE, which has been developed by CARET along with Georgia Tech, Research Research and others, is a brand new platform that aims to support academic collaboration and academic networking. It is being developed by the same organisation that oversees the Sakai CLE project which of course is the software which underpins WebLearn.
The easiest way to explain OAE is by analogy: Universities have always had classrooms. But recently, many have invested heavily in new buildings with a mix of informal break-out areas designed to draw people together – faculty, students and administrators. This is the idea behind the OAE. It’s an informal collaborative online space that sits alongside the highly structured Learning Management Systems such as Sakai CLE designed to deliver courses to students.
OAE supports many types of collaborations, including research projects, ad-hoc student groups, committees, collaborative projects, etc. It’s a network of people, content and groups, where files, links and collaborative documents can easily be created and shared with other people and groups, whilst being able to provide feedback and participate in discussions.
OAE is a multi-tenant system, which means that it can support multiple universities on the same physical installation. Each university has its own tenancy with its own branding, skinning and users and a sort of permeable membrane around it. It’s easy to keep things private to your own institution or research group, or to mix things up with the rest of the world. It has a modern architecture that will scale to millions of users and a simple, intuitive interface that does not force users to behave in a particular way.
We will be very interested to hear what Oxford University staff members think about Apereo OAE.
