Sestri Levante (IT), October 2009 - Giunti Labs, a vendor of learning-content-management solutions and digital-repository platforms, is leading a consortium of companies appointed to re-engineer the learning-content production and delivery infrastructure of Training Research Innovation and (job) Orientation (TRIO), the web learning system of Italy's Tuscany region.
The web portal offers a wide range of learning products, with a catalogue of over 1,400 work-skills-related eLearning courses. To date, some 542,000 such courses have been delivered to over 140,000 users since TRIO's inception in 2002.
These materials are being delivered via a publicly accessible web portal - known as TRIO - in an innovative approach to providing continuing professional development opportunities for public and private-sector organizations, as well as for all the inhabitants of the Tuscany region. In this, the project contributes to the implementation of European policies on lifelong learning.
The TRIO project consortium, under Giunti Labs' leadership, has introduced an extended implementation of Moodle to be the core of the new TRIO platform. This is being integrated with HarvestRoad Hive, a federated digital-repository system (FDRS) developed by Giunti Labs that manages any form of content such as SCORM/AICC courseware, learning objects, digital assets, e-books, and podcasts.
By adding the HarvestRoad Hive DR infrastructure to Moodle, TRIO managers will be able to unbundle their content offering from any specific delivery platform. This enables the content to interoperate with any kind of third-party learning or course- management system and to interchange standard content catalogues with other public administration agencies in Italy, Europe, and worldwide - thus fostering maximum reuse and sharing of the work-based curricula.
TRIO is already integrated with several commonly used course-management systems, authoring, and content-assembly tools. Moreover, the final catalogue has already been shared with several local government administration agencies in Italy, Spain, and beyond.
In the new TRIO architecture, Moodle functionality is complemented by information services (KCMF), virtual classroom services (DimDim), collaborative social-networking services for sharing knowledge and experience (Elgg), as well as experimental mobile services via mobileLearning modules offered by the HarvestRoad Hive DR add-on.
"The TRIO catalogue of courses is being migrated to the SCORM standard and extended with 1,800 hours of new courses developed by Giunti Labs and a handful of partners using Giunti Labs' LCMS and DR technologies", said Antonella Castaldi, TRIO Project Manager at Giunti Labs. "Courses will also be reorganized according to new semantic aggregations such as series, thematic areas, and certified learning paths following market, regional, and institutional standards."
In 2006, the European Commission awarded the TRIO project the European Label for language teaching through innovation and effective teaching practices.
