Open Source Studio (OSS) began in the fall of 2012 as a project of the Center for Integrated Media (CIM) at the California institute of the Arts (CalArts) near Los Angeles, California. In collaboration with CIM, the first OSS course was taught by Randall Packer from his studio in Washington, DC, involving CalArts graduate students from the various schools of Music, Art, Dance, Theater, and Film.

Thus the platform was born: an integration of live and asynchronous online tools that provide an interdisciplinary, networked approach to creative work, research, discussion, and collaborative learning in the studio arts. In the spring of 2013, Packer was invited to develop the project further at the School of Art, Design, and Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. OSS was substantially redesigned in the spring of 2014 in collaboration with ADM PhD student, artist and designer Juan Camilo González, to extend the versatility and scope of WordPress as a custom multi-site online environment.

With this configuration, each student participates in a network of sites to create an online environment that provides students greater flexibility, creative freedom and authoring capability for collaboration and aggregation of artwork, assignments, process, documentation, research, writing, and social media. With the support of CITS (Centre for IT Services), OSS is now fully integrated into the NTU TEL (Technology Enabled Learning) program that serves online learning across the University.