Accolade for Giunti Labs’ NovaRes: the ‘New Thing’ in Educational Resources mobile, virtual and location based architecture

Giunti Labs was named the ‘most innovative technology demonstrator’ at the OpeniWorld (OiW) event in New Orleans, USA, recently. The event, which was organised by OKI, followed the annual MERLOT conference and, according to Stephan Thieringer, Giunti Labs’ COO for North America: “Giunti Labs’ ’NovaRes: the New Thing in Educational Resources Management‘ product attracted great interest from industry colleagues and from potential collaborators among the vendors at the event.”

The OiW committee selected eight software systems for evaluation, from organisations including Apple, the University of Washington and the National Autonomous University of Mexico as well as Giunti Labs. These products addressed the key issues of shareable and transparent identity management; easy and personal course information management; platform independent learning, and convenient and ubiquitous access to online content.

The Giunti Labs’ NovaRes demonstrator impressed the OiW judges and attendees alike with its use of interoperability specifications to enhance learning by blending standards based mobile learning in the real world with learning experiences in virtual worlds.

Imagine being able to place images from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on the walls of a virtual walk-through gallery. Giunti Labs didn't just imagine such a scenario, Giiunti Labs delivered it using learn eXact’s LCMS technologies and OKI Osids based extensions.

At OiW, Giunti Labs, Europe's leading vendor of e-learning and mobile learning content management solutions, revealed The NovaRes Educational Resources Management demonstrator which introduced delegates to Giunti Labs’ e-learning content management platform, learn eXact™, extended with a multi-vendor Service Orientated Architecture. NovaRes enables e-learning authors and publishers to integrate new generation mobile, virtual and rich media learning experiences within their streamline e-learning architectures.

According to Giunti Labs’ Thieringer, in the authoring and creation process, NovaRes can demonstrate interoperability with:
• Back-end pre-existing repositories and/or federations of learning assets repositories, such as Merlot, Ariadne, Lornet, Dspace and LionShare
• Intermediate content brokerage solutions, such as the Calstate Digital marketplace
• Front end delivery solutions, such as Moodle™, Sakai™, Blackboard™ and/or WebCT

“NovaRes uses a combination of e-learning content packaging standards, such as IMS and SCORM, as well as query and publishing interfaces such as OKI OSIDs, SQI and SRW, to layer the NovaRes blueprint on top of pre-existing e-learning architectures,” he said.

The demonstration at OiW focused on a specific use of the NovaRes Architecture, named NovaArs - The New Face of Art - in art education scenarios. These included how:
• Art content authors and publishers can create advanced learning objects with Giunti Labs’ LCMS System and Authoring Tools, accessing distributed collections to harvest, broker, create and index standard contents to be then pushed and/or pulled to and from both commercial and open source LMS solutions.
• Advanced instructional designers can use these standard Learning Objects within new Collaborative Learning Worlds, Mobile devices and Location Based Navigation Systems to prepare a fully immersive blended learning experience.
• Students can access the scenarios created by a blending of web-based platforms and tools and a collection of mobile devices, such as Windows Mobile™M, BlackBerry™, Symbian™ smart phones and PDAs, to search and deliver standard contents while accessing Open DRs in the federation.

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