Company Blog

To mark the biennial Taoiseach’s Public Service Excellence Awards, The Irish Times produced an excellent supplement on July 13th which featured the NCCA FÓN project.

Learnosity has partnered with the NCCA to deliver the FÓN project and the two other projects that were part of the same initiative. On July 8th, the NCCA were honoured with a prestigious Taoiseach’s Excellence in Public Service Award at a ceremony in Dublin Castle.

The Irish Times article remarks that mobile phones are normally seem as the enemy of traditional classroom learning but in the case of FÓN they became very much an ally.

The junior certificate level students on the FÓN project used Learnosity Voice to do spoken homework, build their vocabulary by getting new words by text message and chat directly to other students in Irish. With all of their work being recorded, teachers and students could review the work online, identify any weaknesses and address them together.

Learnosity Voice is the solution behind all 3 phases of the initiative: MALL in 2007, FÓN in 2008 to 2009 and most recently in a project that focused on a more formal spoken assessment environment.

The benefits of FÓN are many, and some in particular were recounted by John Hammond, deputy CEO of the NCCA, when he referred to improvements in autonomous learning, opportunities for students from different schools to chat in Irish on the phone using Learnosity Voice and the way in which the project brought Irish to life for students.

We congratulate the NCCA on their recent award and look forward to many more successful partnerships together.

Learnosity is delighted to announce the appointment of Tom Davy as non-executive Chairman. Tom is a very accomplished and well known industry figure with over 30 years experience in educational publishing, software and services.

During the 1990's he held senior executive positions at Pearson Education including President and Chief Executive Officer EMEA of Addison Wesley Longman, President of Pearson's worldwide English Language Teaching group and Chairman of Longman’s joint venture companies in Germany, Egypt and South Africa.

In 1999 Tom founded Spark Learning a company that developed educational content and services for schools and parents. Amongst the most successful products were Spark Island and educational books and software developed with the BBC and Harper Collins.

In 2006 Tom joined Thomson Learning as CEO of their businesses in EMEA and was part of the team that sold Thomson Learning to Apax Partner for $7.75 billion in 2007.

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.

Greetings from the United States! I recently attended and presented at CALICO 2010 in Amherst College, MASS. Despite my presentation starting at 8am on Saturday, a sizeable and good natured group turned up.

It was really interesting to hear from the group how community colleges, four year colleges and universities, both in the US and elsewhere, are responding to huge demand to develop English language proficiency. Naturally students have a requirement to interact with the academic content of their fields of study. The group were really interested in how Learnosity Voice could help address the needs of these students in higher education.

Some members of the group are teaching the next generation of K-12 English language instructors and a lively discussion ensued about how best prepare teachers to work with students on the Speaking and Listening components of the Common European Framework of Reference for Language, TESOL standards, and the Common Core standards in the US. We discussed how content teachers will be equipped to teach and assess in any of these areas when language instruction was not part of their pre-service experience and nor does it seem to be available in in-service.

I am confident that Learnosity can play a big part in delivering solutions to assist with these challenges. Have a look below at the presentation that I delivered.

Please contact me with any questions you may have (jesse.markow [at] learnosity.com), or leave a comment here.

Jesse Markow, Learnosity Education Consultant, USA.

Learnosity Presentation at CALICO 2010

The Irish Minister for Trade and Commerce Mr Billy Kelleher TD announced on Friday that Learnosity has signed a €100k contract with the Association of Independent Schools in Queensland Australia.

The Minister who led a week long trade mission to Australia, met staff and customers of Learnosity.

Mark Lynch, CTO and co-founder of Learnosity said, "We are delighted to be working on this innovative project with Independent Schools Queensland. This project will demonstrate how language learning can be accelerated through the appropriate use of iPod’s and Learnosity’s innovative solutions.”

Gerry Murphy (Enterprise Ireland), Minister Billy Kelleher, Gavin Cooney (Learnosity)

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Conor Sheahan as a Non Executive Director of Learnosity. Conor's role will be to work with the founders in terms of the Strategic Growth and development of the Company.

A Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, Conor has 23 years business experience working as an Accountant, Investment Banker and Corporate Finance adviser and in the last 8 years a CFO and CEO based largely in North America.

In 2005, Conor took over as CEO of Performix Technologies (having joined as CFO in 2000) and led the successful sale of the company in 2006 to Nice Systems.

Conor has a unique mix of advisory and operational experience including CFO and CEO experience in both technology and non technology companies.

I signed up for Twitter more than two years ago, but wasn't sure what all the fuss was about. Now Mr. & Mrs. Kutcher, Barack Obama & Oprah, and Earl & Randy have jumped on the band wagon, I felt it was worth another look. Unlike Facebook (which I use for personal purposes), Twitter does seem to be genuinely useful in business, and it has already generated significant sales leads for us @Learnosity.

With all manor of eLearning people using twitter, at Learnosity we have started using it to get the word out. Our CTO Mark Lynch is @lynch_mark, and I (Gavin Cooney, CEO) is @gcooney. Learnosity also has it's own account @Learnosity. Please feel free to follow us and interact with us on Twitter.

It is also great to see our own client, the NSW Board of Studies, embrace micro blogging as a medium to spread news. This augments their news website which we built for them some years ago based on blog technology, complete with RSS feeds etc.

I was honoured last night to be chosen as Young IT Person of the Year in the Irish ICT Excellence Awards.

The ICT Excellence Awards, now in its tenth year, is Ireland's longest-running and most prestigious event recognising outstanding achivers in the information and communications technology industry.

Every year, these awards are hotly contested in a variety of trade categories. The 2009 Awards were presented last night by Marty Whealan at a Gala Presentation Dinner in the Royal Marine Hotel, Dun Laoghaire.

I was up against some stiff competition from Keep IT Safe, Movies.ie and Microsoft. I would like to thank Mr. Greg Tierney from Steljes who sponsored and presented my award.

We at Learnosity are delighted to announce a strategic distribution relationship, with ConnectED. ConnectED are the UK’s leading provider of SONY language labs and mobile learning platforms, and so were an ideal fit for Learnosity and our core Learnosity Voice solution.

Building on the great success of our Irish and Australian government projects, Learnosity are now offering our voice platform directly to schools in the UK.

Mark Stimpfig (MD, ConnectED), Gavin McWhirter (Enterprise Ireland), Gavin Cooney (CEO, Learnosity) and Nigel Stally (UK Business Developement Manager, Learnosity) at an Enterprise Ireland Event on St. Patricks Day 2009 celebrating the signing of the Learnosity/ ConnectED distribution deal.

UK Pilot Project May-June 2009

To celebrate our first product focussed directly on the UK school market, Learnosity together with ConnectED are now inviting 20 teachers to pilot the application with some GSCE language students in French, Spanish or German. This free trial is intended to last 4 weeks, and involve one class of around 30 students. The trial will happen in May and June 2009.

What is Required of Teachers/ Schools?

• The trial is completely free, and will cost nothing.
• The trial will use students own phones and existing computers within the school. No additional resources will be required.
• Teachers will be expected to spend a certain amount of time on the project, marking their own students conversations. A couple of hours training may also be required.

Expected Outcomes for the School

• Notable increase in spoken language skills (approx 10-20% increase based on previous trials)
• Promotion of school for practical use of technology
• Increased student motivation

What’s in it for Learnosity?

• UK based case-study of technology
• Any publicity surrounding project

Please contact us if your school might be interested in taking part in this UK pilot project.

On Thursday last Learnosity, in conjunction with Enterprise Ireland, and The Consul General of Ireland Mr. Patrick Scullion hosted a cocktail reception at The Consul General's private residence, The Penthouse of The Grace Hotel in Sydney.

The event was to celebrate Learnosity's success in the Australian market, and to launch the preliminary findings of the project we recently completed with The Le@rning Federation. Stuart Tait, General Manager of The Le@rning Federation, presented the preliminary findings of the project.

We were also lucky enough to have one of the teachers involved in the project, Tim Rodgers from Victor Harbour South Australia, along with Gayl O'Connor from The Le@rning Federation fly to Sydney for the event to share their experiences.

More about The Le@rning Federation project:

The Le@rning Federation's (TLF) Mobile Applications for Language Learning (MALL) project embraced the ubiquity of mobile phone usage by students, and piloted the delivery of Indonesian language learning by means of Learnosity's voice technology. This trial has been undertaken by The Le@rning Federation and teachers and students from thirteen schools in three states: South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria.

The event was a huge success, and was very well attended by senior educationalist across New South Wales, including representatives from the following organisations:

• NSW Board of Studies
• The Le@rning Federation
• Catholic Education Office
• Association of Independent Schools
• NSW Department of Education and Training
• Pearson Education Australia
• Australian Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations (AFMLTA)
• Open High School
• Modern Langauges Teacher's Association of New South Wales
• Asia Education Teacher's Association (AETA)
• Japanese Teachers Association of NSW
• NSW Association of French Teachers (NAFT)

We'd like to thank everyone for taking the time out to participate in the event. The preliminary results of The Le@rning Federation MALL project were enthusiastically received by all attending.

We'd also like to take this opportunity to thank The Consul General Mr. Scullion, along with Eimear and Maria in Enterprise Ireland for their help in hosting the event.