SUNY Empire State College Selects GoingOn Academic Engagement Network

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Dec 6, 2011) - GoingOn Networks, Inc. announced today that the State University of New York (SUNY) Empire State College has selected GoingOn's Academic Engagement Network as a key component of its School of Graduate Studies' innovative new collaborative learning environment. The GoingOn Academic Engagement Network will complement and extend SUNY Empire State College's existing learning management system (LMS) by providing an integrated academic platform where students and faculty can more effectively connect with the people, information and activities that support their success and enrich their academic life experience.

Founded in 1971, SUNY Empire State College is a distinctive statewide SUNY institution focused on nontraditional teaching and learning, where college faculty mentors guide learners by designing an individual degree program within 12 broad areas. Whether online or face-to-face, or a combination of both, learners decide how, when and where to study. The college serves mostly working adults pursuing associate, bachelor's and master's degrees onsite at 35 locations in New York state and abroad, as well as online everywhere.

"We continually seek out cutting edge technology that can help us engage our students, improve learning outcomes and provide a more complete academic experience. In support of that, the School of Graduate Studies is developing a new online learning environment with GoingOn," said Robert J. Clougherty, PhD, Dean of the College of Graduate Studies at SUNY Empire State College.

GoingOn provides SUNY Empire State College with an integrated social platform where students and faculty can create and participate in social classrooms, study groups, faculty collaboratives and broader program-level communities. The program will be piloted in two brand-new master's degree programs in January, with plans for implementation across all graduate programs for the 2011-12 academic year. More specifically, the GoingOn platform will provide:

• A central information hub and collaboration environment for several master's programs and associated administrative activities, within the School for Graduate Studies
• Flexible social learning spaces for the college's Project for Online Open Learning, which is focused on breaking down the silos of the traditional study/course

"We are extremely honored that SUNY Empire State College has selected GoingOn as its partner to develop its innovative new online learning and student engagement environment. Both organizations share a common conviction that it is no longer acceptable to just think about putting courses online. We need to think about what the academic life experience looks like in the age of the social web," said Jon Corshen, CEO of GoingOn Networks. "Legacy portals and course-centric LMSs are not sufficient to engage today's learners. Fortunately, a new generation of stream-based (open source) technologies are making it faster and more affordable than ever for solutions like ours to enable intelligent information sharing, collaboration and networking on a massive scale."

To learn more about GoingOn or its Academic Engagement Network, visit www.GoingOn.com.

About GoingOn Networks, Inc.
GoingOn is an innovative academic social networking platform that enables students, faculty and administrators to more effectively connect, collaborate and learn. GoingOn offers the first fully integrated platform for higher education that enables institutions to build an internal academic network where students and faculty can more easily share resources, create online communities and curate their academic connections, while keeping them separate from their personal social networks. The GoingOn platform combines a powerful community-building environment with integrated academic networking features and a modern stream-based architecture that allows any type of information, activity or event to be easily published to communities, user groups or to a user's personalized Virtual Commons. Delivered as an on-demand solution leveraging open source foundations and incorporating leading-edge social web technologies, the GoingOn platform can easily be integrated into existing LMS and SISs and deployed as a single community or an institution-wide network. For more information, please visit www.GoingOn.com.

About SUNY Empire State College
SUNY Empire State College was established in 1971 by the SUNY Board of Trustees and then-chancellor and future United States Commissioner of Education Ernest L. Boyer as a distinctive statewide SUNY institution focused on nontraditional teaching and learning, where college faculty mentors guide learners through designing an individual degree program within 12 broad areas. At SUNY ESC, whether online or face-to-face, or a combination of both, learners decide how, when and where to study. Accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the college serves mostly working adults pursuing associate, bachelor's and master's degrees onsite at 35 locations in New York state and abroad, as well as online everywhere. Further, the college continues its 40-year commitment to valuing learning gained from life and work experience and has a clear process for assessing and awarding credit for college-level learning gained through experience. For more information, please visit www.esc.edu.