Company Blog

We send our congratulations to our customers the Open University who recently celebrated 20 years of languages.

To mark this significant milestone staff past and present got together at Walton Hall in Milton Keynes along with guests and speakers.

Contributions included that of Dr Regine Hampel whose presentation focused on the use of technology to overcome the possible isolation of the distance language learner.

Learnosity has worked with The Open University on a number of significant projects where Learnosity Voice was used by French and English language learners. This two phase project saw students’ first using mobile phones and later OU Voice, an app for iPhone/iPod.

More than 80 students took part in the projects which enabled them to submit spoken work for self assessment and tutor for review. Feedback from the project was very positive with students feeling that Learnosity Voice offers a more “realistic experience”, stretching and developing their skills in oral interaction more effectively, especially in the context of having little opportunities for real oral interaction.

He believes that because users have to give an almost immediate response to the verbal prompt as opposed to when using a DVD Learnosity Voice offers,

Read more about the projects undertaken with the Open University.

Learnosity partnered with The Open University on a project that looked at how mobile devices can be integrated into course study.

The research project explored and evaluated the contexts in which students find mobile devices most beneficial in learning. Furthermore, the project sought to inform future plans for integrating mobile speaking activities into the design of new courses.

A second, larger, project with the Open University is already underway.

Read more about our work with The Open University.

The Handheld Learning Awards for Innovation & Best Practice were held during the recent Handheld Learning 2009 conference. I was proud to accept a prestigious Innovation Award in the Secondary Education category, for Learnosity Voice.

There was 200 nominees, with 36 finalists chosen from a panel of 8 Independent cross-sector judges. There was then over 4000 public votes to decide the winners. Many thanks to everyone who voted, and to the Learning Without Frontiers team who put on an excellent show and conference.

The awards were presented by well known TV presenter Jason Bradbury. The whole event was captured on video. If I had known it was being filmed, I might have said a few more words!

Gavin Cooney accepting Handheld Learning Award for Learnosity on Vimeo

Nomination Outline

At Handheld Learning 2009, I presented a session called Use of mobile phones for language learning. The presentation was on Monday 5th October in a seminar called "Best Practice in Action". For part of the presentation, Rhodri Thomas from The Open University was kind enough to join me.

A video of the presentation is below. It's also available on the HHL website and vimeo.com.

For more video from Handheld Learning 2009, go to Handheld Learning's channel on Blip.tv or subscribe via iTunes. The full conference proceedings are available with Video, Audio and Photographs. There is some great content there for anyone interested in Handheld and Mobile Learning.

The presentation itself is available below.

Below is a video demo of the iPhone Application we created for The Open University. I previously posted some screenshots of this application.

Learnosity has been working with The Open University in the UK for the past few months. We did a pilot using the Learnosity Voice platform to deliver spoken language learning in the Intermediate French L120 course.

This iPhone application has been developed to replace/ augment the Learnosity Voice student web-interface. The application allows students review their answers, receive teacher feedback, and listen to sample answers using an iPhone or an iPod Touch.

Download the app from the iTunes App store. Note: Learnosity/OU login is required.

Learnosity / Open University iPhone App demo on Vimeo.com.

For those of you interested, this video created with the iPhone Simulator from the iPhone SDK, iSimulate, Jing, Soundflower and Quicktime Pro.

We're delighted to announce that Learnosity Voice has been fully integrated with Skype. This means that students anywhere can use skype to call the system from their computer, completely free of charge. Students call a Skype name as opposed to dialing a phone number. We have already implemented this in the UK, USA and Australia.

Feel free to test it out by calling learnosity_vdemo from your Skype.

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'.