Toolwire Wins Red Herring Global 100 Award as the World Leader in Experiential Learning Solutions
Scalable experiential learning technologies support community colleges and for-profit universities focused on engaging and retaining students and producing workforce-ready graduates
Toolwire (www.toolwire.com), the world leader in experiential learning technologies, announced that it has been named to the Red Herring Global 100, a prestigious list recognizing the leading private technology companies in North America, Europe, and Asia.
Red Herring editors were among the first to recognize that companies such as Google, Skype, Baidu, Salesforce.com, YouTube, eBay and many others would change the way we live and work.
"Toolwire is greatly honored to join Red Herring's distinguished list of global leaders," commented Toolwire President and CEO John Valencia. "2011 was a record-breaking year for our company; however, we anticipate even greater success in 2012. We're developing learning solutions for most of the top 15 for-profit universities and several large community college consortia to help them engage and retain more students and produce career-ready graduates in high demand fields such as Health Care, Business, and Information Technology. In addition, we're working with several publishers to embed learning content into our experiential learning solutions in ways that will bring learning to life for our students. As Red Herring's editors have clearly identified, Toolwire's immersive, contextual learning experiences are a game-changing innovation in education."
"Choosing the best out of the previous two years was by no means a small feat," said Alex Vieux, Chairman of Red Herring. "After rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed down our list from 1,100 potential companies to 100 winners. It was an extremely difficult process. Toolwire should be extremely proud of its achievement, the competition for the Top 100 was fierce. The Top 100 Global are truly the best of the best."
Toolwire Learnscapes, StudentDesktops, LiveLabs, and Scenarios provide on-demand, personalized practice and "virtual internships" to meet the needs of today's learners. Toolwire's learning solutions address a fundamental problem: experiential learning has been significantly underutilized in education and training. In the past, the challenge of delivering experiential learning has been time consuming, expensive, hard to scale, and hard to assess.
Toolwire has found a way to solve these problems by innovating a range of learning solutions that help students develop both hard-skills and soft-skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, and communication in engaging and relevant ways that address the age-old student objections, "Why am I studying this? How do these concepts apply to the real world?"
Toolwire's earliest clients included several leading global software companies looking to reduce training costs. For these clients, the company developed learning solutions providing on-demand access to Hard/Software in the "cloud". These valuable hands-on learning tools remain extremely attractive to institutions providing workforce training and certification in fields such Information Technology (IT) and Health Information Technology (HIT).
The company's recent growth has been driven by the large scale development and deployment of immersive learning environments known as Toolwire Learnscapes.
Innovated in response to demand from Higher Education institutions, Learnscapes contain interactive video-characters and highly engaging, photo-realistic environments that create a "context" for learning to take place and require students to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills. Along the way, "Natural Assessments" track student performance and provide remediation in a way that is extremely valuable to institutions focused on greater accountability and measurable student outcomes.
Toolwire Learnscapes have been used by over 500,000 students and employees across multiple institutions and subject disciplines in 71 countries. These students have benefited from over 100 million minutes of real life experience and training using Learnscapes.
Red Herring Global is the culmination of a year's work of scouring thousands of privately held companies from around the world. The pool of candidates for the award contains the top private companies from the Regional competitions in Europe, North America, and Asia.
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