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IMS Learning Impact Leadership Award for Giunti Labs and the Region of Tuscany

Florence, ItalyLearning NewseXact learning solutions

Giunti Labs - a leading learning and mobile content management solution provider – has been given a ‘Learning Impact Leadership Award’ at this year’s IMS Learning Impact Awards, held in Long Beach, California, in May.

Giunti Labs, along with the Region of Tuscany, in Italy, received the award for ‘Building Europe's largest lifelong learning for employment initiative’. The project – known as the Training Innovation Research and (job) Orientation (TRIO) – uses the Moodle LMS and the HarvestRoad Hive digital repository (DR).

Giunti Labs leads a consortium of companies running the work-related e-learning regional initiative, TRIO - Tuscany’s web portal learning system (www.progettotrio.it). This web portal offers a wide range of learning products, with a catalogue of some 1,500 work-skills related e-learning courses – the most popular of which are IT, language and business related learning materials.

To date, some 542,000 courses have been delivered to some 150,000 users since TRIO’s inception in 2002. There are currently at least 70,000 active learners on the system, downloading 40,000 training hours per month.

Moreover, surveys show that five out of six users go on to take another TRIO-delivered course and the system has a 95% satisfaction rating with users.

The learning materials are delivered via the TRIO web portal in an innovative approach to providing continuing professional development opportunities for public and private sector organisations. In this, the project contributes to the implementation of European policies on lifelong learning.

According to Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO of Giunti Labs: “The TRIO project consortium, under Giunti Labs’ leadership, has introduced an extended implementation of Moodle to be the core of the new TRIO platform. This is integrated with HarvestRoad Hive, a federated digital repository system developed by Giunti Labs that manages any form of content such as SCORM/AICC courseware, learning objects, digital assets, e-books and podcasts.

“By adding the HarvestRoad Hive DR infrastructure to Moodle, TRIO managers are able to unbundle their content offering from any specific delivery platform,” he continued. “This enables this content to interoperate with any kind of third party learning or course management system and to interchange standard content catalogues with other public administration in Italy, Europe and worldwide - thus fostering maximum reuse and sharing of the produced work-based curricula.”

In the TRIO architecture, Moodle functionality is complemented by information services (KCMF), virtual classroom services (DimDim), collaborative social networking services for sharing knowledge and experiences (Elgg) as well as experimental mobile services via mobile learning modules offered by the HarvestRoad Hive DR add-on.

“TRIO represents ‘excellence’ in the world of e-learning because it addresses the continuous evolution of training needs successfully,” explained Cardinali.

“It meets the growing demand for training, providing opportunities for re-training, knowledge increase or re-orientation, to ensure the business skills needed to succeed. In this, it supports and sustains the training needs of public and private bodies, promoting the development process of e-government, and contributes to the creation of an integrated regional system of education, training and work.”

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