Tuesday, November 17, 2009

LearnTrends Innovation Award Winners 2009

We’ve just announced the innovation awards associated with LearnTrends 2009. The session was fraught with technical difficulties, so I thought it would be worth capturing a bit about each of the four award winners here.

CUDA Business Brain

CUDA technologies is a small software firm within the Hi Performance Learning and IQ Business Group in South Africa, the United Stated and Australia.

In 2007, they launched the CUDA Business Brain as an integrated Workplace Performance Support Solution. It provides a blend of learning management and performance support. Because they operate in bandwidth constrained locations, they have implemented an extremely light web interface. They provide automated content distribution capability. A unique a Visio enabled process publishing tool that 'walks' users through performance support when they need it. This combination, backed by flexible expert location, rating and ranking mechanisms, makes our offering stand apart in providing cutting edge performance support and learning management to large audiences.

Learnosity

Learnosity provide a set of tools to help in the assessment, teaching and learning of spoken language skills. The Learnosity system is designed for speaking, listening and learning via a mobile phone.

The use of the mobile phone allows students practice their spoken skills in and outside of the classroom, facilitating student-led learning. The use of such simple technology eliminates any required technical support in the classroom, and make the system extremely easy to use for both teachers and students. Voice-chat and text-chat facilitate structured, moderated and anonymous peer-to-peer learning.

Thinking Worlds

Thinking Worlds is a new kind of 3D “Serious Games” simulation engine and authoring tool. It provides an authoring interface that fuses a visual story boarding system with easy to follow templates, both of which require no programming skill at all. It makes it possible to develop rich simulations in a fast and cost-effective way. It publishes simulations that are both LMS and SCORM compliant. Playback is through standard technologies allowing easier distribution.

CLT Plug and Learn

CLT Plug&Learn is an interesting blended language learning course combining learning software with extensive online tutoring and regular (virtual) classroom training, framed by a placement test, a Kick-Off meeting and a final test. Based on the results of the placement test, students are offered a language course designed to meet their goals. During the self-study phase, they practice their written, reading, listening, comprehension and pronunciation skills with the language software. A tutoring team assists students via e-mail. They receive a weekly e-mail with their assignment, additional written production exercises, motivational and technical tips as well as personalized feedback based on the self-study results as recorded in the LMS.

Congratulations to the winners.

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