NYU Demo of Sakai Open Academic Environment

We’ve been tracking Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE) progress (formerly known as Sakai 3; see project plans here) and thought you’d be interested in a recent announcement.

On November 5,  2010, New York University launched the first pre-release pilot of the Sakai OAE — a revolutionary platform for academic networking and collaboration. The NYU instance will be known as the ATLAS Network (Advanced Teaching, Learning, And Scholarship Network). The pilot will grow to include 5,000 students and faculty from six different NYU schools.

Below is a 13-minute screencast of their implementation.

The NYU pilot focuses on two important areas of need.

1. It provides a single NYU network for many diverse university communities to use.
2. And it provides a flexible set of options for implementing portfolios.

Features include:

• searchable profiles,
• group spaces and uploaded content, and
• two portfolio implementations.

The pilot is being overseen by a cross-school, academic-led committee charged with oversight of the development and implementation of the Sakai OAE environment at NYU. Initial funding for Sakai at NYU was provided by a 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-Up grant.

It’s exciting to see the work of so many come together! Congrats!