Personal Branding on Ulitzer

Standards, tools and techniques for competency and skills based learning content personalisation are beginning to emerge - which is just as well because they can help organisations perform better in the increasingly competitive global labour marketplace and world economy. This is the message that Giunti Labs will outline at this year's Online Educa conference and exhibition, being held in Berlin from 2^nd to 4^th December.

According to Giunti Labs' CEO, Fabrizio Cardinali, who will give a presentation at the Online Educa conference, leading organisations are now reshaping their learning departments, re-tooling them towards systems and technologies that empower higher degrees of learning personalisation and customisation.

These systems and technologies are based on students' and employees' skills, competencies and portfolios as well as the delivery media available. Such systems and technologies make organisations better suited to empower their evolving workforces and their increasing re-skilling and performance support needs.

Cardinali's presentation will explore the new learning content production and delivery strategy, definition and infrastructure for the Training Innovation Research and (job) Orientation (TRIO) project, Europe's largest work-related e-learning regional initiative developed by Giunti Labs for Italy's Tuscany Region.

TRIO offers a wide range of learning products for job related skills, with a catalogue of over 1,400 e-learning courses and, to date, some 542,000 such courses delivered to over 140,000 users since TRIO's inception in 2002.

The TRIO project infrastructure, conceived by Giunti Labs, is based on an extended implementation of Moodle, including information services (KCMF), virtual classroom services (DimDim) and collaborative social networking services for sharing knowledge and experiences (Elgg). These are integrated with Giunti Labs' HarvestRoad Hive, a federated digital repository System (FDRS) which unbundles, manages and delivers 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 can unbundle their content offering from any specific delivery platform - and offer the content repository to third party eGovernment initiatives and public authorities with no limit to the content strategy and delivery solution in place. TRIO is already integrated with several commonly used course management systems, authoring and content assembly tools - and the final catalogue has already been adopted by several local government administrations in Italy, Spain and beyond.

At the Online Educa conference, Giunti Labs will also launch its new ePortfolio and Skills Management System, eXact Portfolio. This web-based eskills and competency management software includes a full skills management application dealing with topics such as apprenticeship, validation scenarios and peer ratings.

The eXact Portfolio solution fully interacts with Giunti Labs' flagship learn eXact LCMS solution to enable skills based content personalisation and repackaging.

Ola Badersten, Managing Director of Giunti Labs Scandinavia, where the eXact Portfolio module was designed, commented: "Current applications blending Giunti Labs' new eXact Portfolio module with organisations' enterprise learning content management systems address content personalisation needs in a large telecom company in Sweden; Fundeon, a knowledge centre providing education for the construction sector in Benelux, and a number of financial services institutions worldwide. Personalised learning, incorporating blended learning opportunities, has even reached the world of eGovernment and labour organisations.

"On a strategic level, eXact Portfolio is about identifying, charting and monitoring personal skills," he added. "Ultimately, the vision is for each person to have one ePortfolio account which is used from that person's first day in school until their retirement - and, perhaps, beyond. This ePortfolio might link with digital repositories of content to provide personalised learning content on demand, based on the user's skills gaps, needs and objectives."

At Online Educa Berlin, Giunti Labs will be at stand B61 at Foyer Potsdam, together with its international partners Stoas from Benelux and International Turnkey Systems (ITS) for the Emirates and Arabic-speaking countries.

As members of the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG), Giunti Labs will also attend ELIG's workshop at the Online Educa conference, which is being held on 2^nd December from 2pm to 6pm.

This workshop brings together key stakeholders to outline the next moves towards achieving a ‘learning society'. These key stakeholders include policy makers, corporate learning officers, learning industry experts and representatives from the education world.

Further details of this workshop can be accessed from the ELIG website (www.elig.org). Registration for the workshop will be free, on a first come first served basis.