In which way does this topic reflect eLearning market needs and demands in Europe?

Fabrizio Cardinali: The European academic and R&D communities have been at the forefront of innovations in learning technologies since the early Delta R&D Programme of the late 80s. The main issue today is to foster recognition of these achievements by wider adoption and uptake. Numerous mainstream international specifications that are now widely adopted by the international community of users were originally conceived within flagship EU R&D projects such as Ariadne, Knowledge on Demand, Easel, and EPICC.

These include the IEEE LOM spec for Learning Objects Metadata, the SCORM Content Packaging format for Content Aggregation, IMS Learning Design for multi-user collaborative learning, and IMS Vdex and EPMS for the exchange of Vocabularies, Taxonomies, and Portfolios. They then needed a long lifecycle outside Europe to achieve wider adoption and market exploitation.

As a result, EU stakeholders are now possibly facing the aggressive return of non-EU solutions providers, often riding patenting issues on concepts that were experimented with a long time ago in the EU. To revert this trend is one of the main challenges of Europe's eLearning industry, which must now act to accelerate the time to market of the innovative solutions coming from the EU R&D cycle by fostering faster engineering of practical solutions and wider market awareness and adoption of resulting solutions.

Do you recognize a nameable advance in this field during the last year?

Fabrizio Cardinali: In the field of Open Standards for Learning Content Management, in which Giunti Labs is mainly involved, we see two main important trends. One is aimed at extending the rigid content packaging format at the basis of the de facto SCORM content publishing standard with additional adaptive, multi-user, and service-enhanced formats as now empowered by the Simple Sequencing (now SCORM 2004), Learning Design, and now Common Cartridge formats recently released by the IMS specifications community.

The second is the focus on Service-Oriented Architectures and Open Learning Services that many groups are now looking into after the first moves from the O.K.I. initiative at MIT. Although still immature, this clearly represents the main trend in architectural design of learning solutions, e.g. standard interfaces between LCMS, LMS, DR, and many other solutions to make eLearning a distributed, open, and interoperable environment that also hooks into the job posting, ERP, and Business Intelligence solutions for a more holistic approach.

Where do you identify a (trend-setting) movement in European efforts in eLearning?

Fabrizio Cardinali: Skills and competency-based education together with new formats for mobile, TV and game-based learning are again demonstrating the vitality of European R&D efforts in this field. Projects like Mobilearn , WearIT@Work , Prolix , TENCompetence are again paving the way towards eLearning 2.0, a space where self-made, collaboratively reviewed, media- and location-aware and skills- and competence-personalized learning experiences will be made available to the workers and learners of the new millennium. Europe is leading this trend but as said, we need to focus on supporting the time to market of such solutions by wider support and wiser selection of our in-house solutions.

What has Giunti Labs' biggest success been?

Fabrizio Cardinali: During 2006, Giunti Labs has confirmed its role as Europe's leading eLearning technology vendor, consolidating its world leadership as eLearning and mobile learning content management technology provider. The new version 4 of its flagship LCMS Suite Learn eXact has been released in Q4 with new add-ons to its Mobile Learning (eXact Mobile), Skills Gap Analysis (eXact Skills), and ePortfolio Management (eXact Portfolio) modules.

A world agreement with Wi-Fi and mobile operators Cisco and Ericsson has also been reached to accelerate real-life deployment of its mobile learning and wearable training solutions.

Learn eXact 4 now adds advanced version control, collaborative workflow, groupware authoring, and online editing to its unique multi-device templating and authoring functionality. It has already been adopted by more than 100 clients worldwide who re-engineering their content-production processes towards massive, rapid, and effective production of new-generation eLearning and mobile learning content using XML templates, RLO contents, and international standards.

As soon as it was released, learn eXact 4 confirmed its leadership as best of breed LCMS and DR solution for Open Source (e.g. Moodle, Sakai) and vendor VLEs (e.g. Blackboard™, WebCT™). It has been acquired during the last quarter by leading corporates (e.g. Astra Zeneca, Ericsson, Gucci), public bodies (e.g. Italian and Swedish Government Tax/Finance Bodies), and academies worldwide (e.g. the University of Lund, the University of Maryland, Cambridge University, and the University of Moscow).