Acadia Announces New Spin-Off Company That Transforms Traditional Learning
April 16th, 2015
Acadia University’s Office of Industry and Community Engagement (ICE), a division of Research & Graduate Studies, today announced the launch of spin-off company, Casenet Media Inc. Casenet is an innovative, cloud-based multi-media case management platform designed to replace the traditional paper-based business case studies used in post-secondary institutions and the corporate training market. Casenet hosts and streams a wide-ranging database of multi-media case studies. Casenet was developed by Dr. Conor Vibert and Dr. Michael Sheppard, both professors at the F.C. Manning School of Business.
Casenet recently signed a distribution agreement with academic publishers John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd to promote Casenet to community colleges and university business professors across Canada, with an eye for international markets in the future. Casenet is also pursuing opportunities in the corporate training market.
“Students spend much of their time connected to the online world through social media and their smartphones, and video is pervasive”, says Vibert. “But in many business school classrooms, print still reigns. Case studies are an instructional staple of undergraduate and MBA programs around the world but for the most part, they’re still glorified print documents with a few charts and diagrams delivered to learners as PDF files. Casenet is a video based response to this disconnect.”
Casenet currently hosts more than 200 multimedia case studies filmed in eleven countries on four continents. What makes Casenet unique is its collection of insight from small and medium-sized business owners and managers, as well as CEOs and executives in multinational companies from around the world and across Nova Scotia. They challenge learners to resolve issues tied to international business, business law, entrepreneurship, human resources, strategic innovation, and marketing, just to name a few.
“We’re seeing a high level of student engagement with Casenet,” says Sheppard. “They find it refreshing to deal with real cases and real people talking about local and global issues that are meaningful to what they’re learning. The delivery style encourages them to be creative, and it always amazes me when they come up with an entirely new solution that wasn’t considered by the person we interviewed for the case.”
Casenet was developed with the support of ICE along with grants from Springboard Atlantic, and the Nova Scotia Gateway Secretariat of the Nova Scotia Department of Economic and Rural Development and Tourism.
“In addition to commercializing intellectual property developed here at Acadia, another primary mandate of the ICE Office is economic development,” says Director of ICE, Leigh Huestis. “Casenet as a spin-off company is a great example of a university-based product that will now be exported around the world.”
To read more: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-397743,view-search.html?query=casenet+&x=0&y=0