Unicon Enlisted by the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising for Sakai Services


Services include enhancements to Sakai Gradebook along with hosting and managed services

Gilbert, AZ – April 16, 2014— Unicon, Inc., a leading IT consulting, services, and support provider specializing in open source for the education technology market, today announced that is has engaged with FIDM/Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising for Sakai services. Unicon performed enhancements to the Sakai Gradebook tool, and is providing hosting and managed services for FIDM’s Sakai environment. Enhancements to the Gradebook tool include user interface and course grades entry modifications. FIDM is taking advantage of Unicon’s hosting and managed services, which affords them SLA-based ticketed support and pro-active management for capacity planning, reliability/availability, and security posture of covered services.

“The enhancements to the Sakai Gradebook tool exceeded our expectations,” said Dave Melone, Director of eLearning at FIDM. “The Gradebook now fully supports our workflow for communicating student progress and grades to FIDM’s student information system, while providing more access to students to review their final grades in a timely manner. This has also brought more value to our faculty by improving the process for reporting final grades and activity via the FIDM eLearning System easily and electronically. We are pleased with the outcome of this work and continue to value our relationship with Unicon for the hosting, managed services, and customization of our Sakai environment.”

Sakai, an Apereo project, is a free and open source learning management system. The Sakai project is a community source software development effort to design, build, and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for higher education. Built by higher education for higher education, Sakai provides a framework and pluggable tool modules for managing, delivering, and assessing student learning. It is designed to bring students and instructors together for knowledge sharing, discussion, and shared learning. Users of Sakai deploy it to support teaching and learning, ad hoc group collaboration, and research collaboration.

Unicon provides services and support for Sakai. Learn more at: www.unicon.net/opensource/sakai.

About FIDM/Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising
FIDM/Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising is a private college for specialized professional education, accredited by WASC Sr. Colleges and Universities and NASAD, granting Associate of Arts, Bachelor of Science in Business Management, and Bachelor of Arts in Professional Studies degrees. FIDM has graduated more than 60,000 students, preparing them for careers in Fashion, Graphics, Interior Design, and Entertainment. The college is headquartered in downtown Los Angeles, with other campus locations in Orange County, San Diego, and San Francisco; 7,000 full-time students.

FIDM is the home of Lifetime’s television series, “Project Runway: Under the Gunn”, starring Tim Gunn, and the site of “Design School” an original series on HGTV featuring eight FIDM Interior Design students in a FIDM SuperLab. The college was also the West Coast home to “Project Runway” and was featured on MTV’s “The Hills,” starring FIDM student, Lauren Conrad.

FIDM Museum & Galleries has one of the nation’s finest costume collections dating from the 18th century and yearly presents major exhibitions. Learn more at www.fidm.edu.

About Unicon
Unicon, Inc. is a leading provider of IT consulting, services, and support for education technology and works with institutions and organizations to find solutions to meet business challenges. Unicon specializes in using open source technologies to deliver flexible and cost-effective systems in the areas of identity and access management, student success, mobile computing, learning management systems, portals, online video, calendaring, email, and collaboration. Unicon is a Commercial Affiliate of the Apereo Foundation; an InCommon Affiliate and Participant; an Industry Member of Internet2; an Advanced Consulting Partner in the Amazon Web Services Partner Network; an Organization Member of the Drupal Association; a Solution Partner of Kaltura; a Services Partner of Liferay; and a reseller of Zimbra. For more information, visit: www.unicon.net.

# # #
Unicon is a Registered Trademark of Unicon, Inc. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners.

Sign up for our newsletter

Newsletter: Innovations in K12 Education
By submitting your information, you agree to our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Oops! We could not locate your form.

Sign up for our newsletter

Newsletter: Innovations in K12 Education
By submitting your information, you agree to our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.