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Could This Be the Frontier of E-Learning?
April 28, 2009
Research under a 36-month, $12.9 million-Euro project, awarded by the European Commission to a consortium of 13 leading European organizations, is close to using grid and cloud computing to bring learners together in both the real and virtual worlds.
Known as the Interactive Realtime Multimedia Applications on Service Oriented Infrastructures (IRMOS) Project, the project recently passed its first 12-month review in a plenary meeting, held in Brussels, where European Commission representatives and an international panel of experts reviewed the first results of the project.
Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO of learning and mobile content management solution provider Giunti Labs, one of 13 companies involved in the IRMOS Project, revealed these preliminary results at the Immersive Education Summit held at the London School of Economics in London last week.
The project aims to develop 'real-time' interaction between people and applications over a service oriented infrastructure (SOI), where processing, storage, and networking need to be combined and delivered with guaranteed levels of service.
The project's key objectives relate to 'extended geo-learning,' delivered 'in-class,' 'in-house,' 'in campus,' and 'in building' on an urban, suburban, and global GPS basis. Cardinali says Giunti Labs also is working on 'learner positioning' in virtual worlds as well as in the real world.
Indeed, the aim of the project is to combine the two, enabling a learner's avatar to be synchronized with that learner's movements in the real world. Cardinali adds: "And, of course, the learning content produced can be re-used and distributed via different delivery media such as text books, Web-based learning materials, mobile learning, digital boards and so on."
"Using the IRMOS-empowered set-up," he says, "learners will be able to meet in specific real world learning hubs, such as museums, tourist attractions, schools and/or industrial locations, and receive location-based learning materials and community services, geo-located on a matter of relevance and context awareness, while the real time system will 'synch' user interactions and information within a virtual reconstruction of the visited premises," explains Cardinali. "This will empower learners to meet a community of mobile and virtual visitors, for a wider performance support and learning experience."
"Today," he says, "we're not thinking about 'e-learning platforms' but, rather, about an ecosystem which knows, or discovers, who the learner is, what language she or he speaks, the learner's background, learning delivery preferences, and so on," he says. "This is helping to produce true personalized learning."
Cardinali says 'virtual worlds' provide excellent research opportunities for Giunti Labs, which, he points out, is "currently working on personal ambient learning solutions."
"Since 2000," he says, "we have worked on more than 50 international research and development projects in this field, including the IRMOS Project, in over 500 European Union academic and industrial partnerships. These partnerships cover new learning methodologies, technologies and solutions, new content repositories, management systems and architectures, and new learning content."
Within the IRMOS Project, Giunti Labs studied both open and non-open source systems and now is developing a user scenario for interactive real time location based learning, integrating its HarvestRoad Hive Digital Repository and learn eXact mobile learning technologies with the Wonderland and Darkstar Virtual Worlds and collaboration platforms by SUN, running on top of the IRMOS SOI infrastructure.
Blending open source learning platforms, such as Sakai or Moodle, with Giunti Labs' mobile learning technologies, the solution constitutes a real time 'extended' location-based learning experience to learners active both in real and virtual learning worlds. "This has meant extending the HarvestRoad Hive digital repository into mobile and virtual worlds' content editors," says Cardinali, "to create content delivered via BlackBerries, PDAs, and so on."
"Once the data is in the digital repository," Cardinali says, "Hive can determine who is attempting to download data, along with what device she or he is using and where she or he is. In other words, Hive will give each learner the right information for the right device in the right location to create a community of those who are following the same studies, regardless of where the learners are."
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