User:David Lefevre/sandbox

‘''Epigeum’’', founded in 2005, is a university spin-off from Imperial College London  focused on the collaborative development of online learning courses for Higher Education.

Epigeum supplies online courseware and supporting services to 230 universities in 27 different countries including Imperial College London, the University of Cambridge, Durham University, the University of St Andrews, the University of Michigan,  the University of North Carolina,  the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the University of Melbourne.

Epigeum provides an alternative, 'collaborative' economic model to the traditional publisher, open source, institutional and grant funded models that generally support course material creation. This model emerged from the realization that the creation of professional-grade interactive and multimedia courses is usually too expensive for an individual institution. Epigeum solves this problem by forming collaborative groups of up to 25 universities to co-fund, peer-review and test such courseware as it is developed. In addition to the universities, these collaborative groups also feature professional designers, developers, pedagogists, editors, film crews and  prominent academic staff including Martin Rees, Harry Kroto, David Watson (academic) , Robert Winston  and John Tooke.

Once a course is completed, Epigeum makes the resulting courseware available to institutions outside the original group on a subscription basis. The firm also provides universities with a range of supporting services to help them make the transition to online learning.

Epigeum courseware is compliant with open-standards and the firm won a Gold award at the 2010 IMS Global Learning Impact Awards in recognition of its work in implementing the IMS Content Package format.

Epiguem was based on the campus at Imperial College in South Kensington until 2012 but it now based one mile away in High Street Kensington.