News story

At Learning 2010, eXact learning solutions identifies learning content management's iPad era key issues

Sestri Levante, ItalyLearning NewseXact learning solutions

At Learning 2010, an event for learning professionals being held at Disney's Coronado Springs Convention Center in Orlando, Florida, from 24th to 27th October, eXact learning solutions, a leading learning content management and digital repository solution provider previously known as Giunti Labs, launches its new mobile learning content management suite, eXact Mobile 2.0, with new applets for the iPhone, Blackberry and, now, iPad devices.

Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO of eXact learning solutions North America, will attend the launch and present a seminar at the conference on ‘ten commandments of enterprise learning content management in the iPad tablet era’ (download the whitepaper ‘Ten Commandments Prompted by Today’s iPad Tablets’ at http://www.exact-learning.com/en/resources/whitepapers).

In advance of his remarks at Learning 2010, Cardinali discussed his views (see http://www.learning2010.com/sponsor-podcasts/exact-learning-solutions.htm) with the world renowned e-learning guru, Elliott Masie, who has organised Learning 2010.

“The iPad not only makes a ‘mobile learning machine’ affordable and accessible but it also removes the previous limits and frustration of poor visualisation and connectivity,” believes Cardinali. “The iPad is both effective and efficient in terms of pedagogic soundness and semantic richness.

“I don't know or think it's going be the iPad - most likely Android based alternatives - but I am sure that the use of tablet-based learning will explode in the next months with a host of location and identity management features being built in to the hardware,” he continued. “This will make location based, context aware, learning content personalisation available and affordable - overcoming the costs or hurdles involved in ‘mobile learning 1.0’.”

“Today, learners are able to take a personal learning machine from their pocket and that machine understands where they are, who they are and what they’re good at or interested in – interworking location based learning, personal digital identity and portfolio management within mobile learning solutions. The machine may hook up to publishers, web and narrowcasters’ stores offering just the right content the learners need, wherever they are and at whatever time slot they’re able to use it - on demand – with learners paying ‘just-in-time’.

“This scenario is not only viable, it is fully sustainable,” he said.

“At eXact learning solutions, we believe that an open market for educational contents will mature and advanced tablets will make the price needed to access these contents collapse below the $100 threshold,” added Cardinali. “This will attract large numbers of new online learners, especially from emerging economies.

“After years of research within mobile learning 1.0, we’re launching our new eXact Mobile 2.0 solutions which bring the power of location based and personal learning content management to the new range of devices out there.”

Cardinali who, in addition to his role at eXact learning solutions, sits on the Board of Directors of the IMS Global Learning Consortium (http://www.imsglobal.org) and is chair of the European Learning Industry Group (http://www.elig.org/), will be presenting these views in more detail – and his ‘ten commandments of enterprise learning content management’ – in session 411 of Learning 2010, on Monday 25th October from 2.45pm to 3.45pm.

In addition, at Learning 2010, eXact learning solutions will unveil the latest version of its eXact Mobile software – which now includes iPad-related features, such as:
• Track and synchronise learning materials offline (upload, download, check status and so on)
• SCORM tracking (SCORM 1.2)
• Content versioning and centralisation
• Contents can be managed and loaded from any platform
• Extensibility to third party services and applications
• Light content downloads
• Specific authoring, models and templates for the mobile platform
• Geo-location based learning

Organised by Elliott Masie, and co-hosted by The Learning CONSORTIUM and the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), Learning 2010 has already attracted over 1,500 delegates.

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