Company Blog

Learnosity was the solutions partner for the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment's MALL and FÓN projects in Ireland. These projects gave us some great information on the real and quantifiable benefits Learnosity Voice delivers for both students and teachers.

Katrina Keogh, Education Officer at the NCCA, speaks in depth to John Hurley from TeachNet about the FÓN project. Katrina shares some fascinating insights and findings from the project. It’s a must hear for anyone interested in language learning and assessment.

The pod cast is available from the NCCA Podcasts website or from iTunes.

Last week the project we are doing with the Irish government was covered by the RTÉ News. RTÉ are the Irish national broadcaster. The segment includes a good overview of the project with contributions from Anne Looney (CEO of the NCCA), Learnosity, a representative of the teachers union (ASTI), along with students and teachers from one of the participating schools, Ratoath College.

RTÉ news story on Learnosity/ NCCA project broadcast 16th November 2009.

For more information on the project, please see the project website and the Irish language case study on the Learnosity website.

This TV coverage came about after Dr. Anne Looney from the NCCA mentioned the project on RTÉ Radio's Morning Ireland the previous week. A recording of that show is available to listen to below:

Anne Looney on RTÉ Morning Ireland November 2nd 2009 (MP3, 5 minutes, 3.4mb)

Read more about Dr. Looney in this glowing profile from the Irish Times, which describes her as "one of the most capable thinkers and managers in Irish education at any level". Having had the pleasure to work with Anne a number of years, I must say I agree.

I previously blogged about some medical applications for Learnosity Voice, which we are working on with the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin.

Voice Response as a medical training application

The "Voice Response Patient Roleplay" involves a student speaking to the system, leaving voice responses. These responses are later reviewed by a tutor.

The following is a recording of a sample call to the system. This call is also available to download in MP3 format (mp3, 1.7mb).

In this example, we modeled the taking of a patient history with prompts and responses in the following areas:

1. Presenting Complaint
2. History of Presenting Complaint
3. Medical History
4. Social History
5. Family History
6. Review of Systems

At each stage the student is given a response from the patient and told what to ask about next. This should prompt the students to ask certain questions at each stage. A sample marking scheme is included in the voice response script.

Sample Question Script

Questions Script and Sample Marking Scheme (pdf, 2 pages, 100kb)

The following is a video of Valérie Demouy from The Open University demonstrating an activity in the Open University L120 Intermediate French mobile learning project which uses Learnosity Voice Response.

Valérie does activity 423, a French language grammar drill using 'en'.

I am just back from Berlin, where I was attending and speaking at the Online Educa conference. My presentation entitled "Voice: The killer application of mobile learning" was very well received. I was also interviewed for the conference podcast.

I also hosted a Special Interest Group lunch called "Large Scale Mobile Learning". This was intended to be a general discussion on mobile learning, specifically what is practical to do on a large scale in 2008. This was a great success, prompting a lively discussion.

Online Educa was an incredibly good conference, and was extremely well organised. It is reported to be the biggest eLearning conference in the world with 2083 participants, including 426 speakers from 44 countries. I would highly recommend the conference to anyone in the learning Industry.

One of the main themes of the conference, particulary the keynotes was Generation-Y... what I could call the Youtube generation.

Bridging the digital divide to this new generation of learners is a major challenge for educators.

This concept was articulated beautifully in an excellent keynote by Michael Wesch an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. Michael was speaking, in part, about is Video on Web 2.0.

Recently we blogged about an exciting mobile learning project we deployed with The Le@rning Federation, a collaborative initiative of all Australian and New Zealand governments.

The project deployed the Learnosity Voice system, in a number of high-schools across three states in Australia. The students use mobile phones to dial into the system and answer a number of questions in the Indonesian language.

Below is a recording of one of the calls, shown with subtitles.