This week we were very pleased to hear that one of projects had picked up another international award.
James Sanders, from Deloitte, attended the GSummit conference in San Francisco which is the top conference for gamification globally.
As a part of the conference, they held their annual GAward ceremony which recognises outstanding achievement in the area of gamification where the Leadership Academy was nominated for their top category - the Greatest Impact category. The Leadership Academy beat out competition from BBVA, NFL, Coursera, and CapGemini to win the award.
As James says:
'Obviously this isn't an Oscar but it terms of gamification, this is as good as it gets.'
So keep watching - we will have some more exciting news soon on the next project that will use badging other techniques.
Over the past year, Janison has worked closely with The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) to design and build their MoneySmart Teaching Online program, which provides educators with the knowledge, skills, strategies and teaching materials to teach consumer and financial literacy.
MoneySmart Teaching Online comprises two modules one for primary and one for secondary educators. The modules are free and provide interactive professional learning and feature expert interviews, case studies in schools, and scenarios.
MoneySmart Teaching Online was built using Janison’s Cloud Learning Suite (CLS) and makes use of simulations – interactive content where the learner chooses characters to follow through a number of scenarios, with different videos showing the outcome of the learners choices.
Simulations are a fun way to see different content, and in this case, different characters and their stories.
We’ve had lots of great comments about our simulations so far.
Why is financial literacy so important for kids?
There’s lots of reasons – registering and completing the modules will show you many, or you can watch this video to get a quick introduction.
Who should use it?
Anyone is welcome to register and use MoneySmart Teaching Online. You can register at:
For Australian school educators, MoneySmart Teaching Online is recognised as 'Continuing Professional Development'. Educators who complete the formal elements of this program will receive a Certificate of Completion which, once endorsed by their School Principal can be submitted to the relevant state/territory authority and may count towards meeting the professional learning requirements for teacher registration and renewal.
Congratulations to the teams at Janison and ASIC for bringing this initiative to life!
When your organisation focuses on one key area such as online learning, you quickly gain an appreciation for the creativity, innovation and commitment of many organisations who work in the area.
It's not just our competing vendors, we see so many of our clients and other education focussed organisations seeking to extend and develop online learning in many different creative ways.
So it is with great pride, we announce our latest award.
Last year we submitted to Brandon Hall our new online, cloud based, assessment platform as an example of a major advancement in technology and it won !
Global recognition for Australian software companies is rare, so we value immensely this acknowledgement of our technology.
What makes our assessment platform different ?
For one, it's built from the ground up using the very latest web development methodologies, it benefits greatly from a modern UI design and an incredibly flexible plug-in architecture that helps us to customise and fit the system in to a variety of delivery mechanisms or enironments.
Also it is designed to support new innovations. A great example of such innovations are its support for new collaborative assessment processes, linking for the first time, more than one student to work together in partnership to complete assessments.
We think this platform will allow real improvements in the ways organisations deliver measurement and assessment. We are glad Brandon Hall think so too.
Stay tuned for more announcements during 2013 on how some of our clients are taking this technology forward in new and innovative ways.
We are very pleased to announce the latest learning web site to move to our Cloud Learning System (CLS).
We have worked with the Royal Life Saving Society of Australia for a number of years and are pleased to now host this client in our latest technology platform.
RLSSA are taking advantage of streamlined course management and enrolment processes that are built in to the CLS platform. These new tools and functions dramatically reduce the cost of managing and providing online courses to thousands of students and teachers in classrooms across Australia.
As we release new tasks and new languages for SolveIT we also add the ability for students from different countries to collaborate - regardless of their language. This video demonstrates how it works.
It is a great example of the wonderfully skilled people we have working at Janison.
Tyson Benson and Ben Clark-Robinson have worked on this project for the last two months building a real example of an innovative application that pushes a number of boundaries.
The app provides a framework for delivering collaborative assessment tasks to students on the latest of devices using the latest of technologies.
We use HTML5 to build engaging, interactive and connected real world tasks for students to solve together. To enable this to work seemlessly and easily we use another new technology called WebSockets.
Finally to allow us to scale this system to support many thousands of students all over the world trialling collaborative assessment - we use Windows Azure and technology framework called SignalR.
Over the next few months we plan to build a number of collaborative task examples, including a Soduko maths based task, a File management task and an Internet Search task.
We'll publish more info as new updates are released.
Well here is our last post for 2012, what a year it is been for us and for many of our clients.
We know that for many business and organisations it hasn't been the best year, budgeting measures and changing economic settlement has caused many organisations to rethink their priorities during 2012.
Sadly, during such times, education is often seen as an area where costs can be cut rather than where investments might secure a better future.
Let's all hope for a better year in 2013. I know our teams are working hard on bringing better, less expensive online training solutions to our market. We hope in 2013 you will find in our range of products and services, new ways in which you can add value to the training, assessment and education services that are provided within your organisations.
This year, we have chosen Kiva, http://www.kiva.org, as our way of connecting with our clients, partners and friends and acknowledging this special time of year.
Personally, I have found Kiva as a great and easy way to do something that helps someone in our world, especially those who are trying to find a path to a better future through education. I hope if you get a Kiva card from us over the next few days you will register and use it to make a difference somewhere.
Have a safe and happy holidays, and we look forward to working with you on some really exciting projects in 2013 !!
It was great to have the opportunity to attend this year's Partners in Learning Global Forum in Prague.
I spent a fair bit of time talking to education leaders about how Janison is working to provide new and better assessment systems for education systems and formally presented some information about the work we have been doing to date.
But even more importantly it was great to see teachers being recognised from all over the world for their innovative projects.
Congratulations to Alice Leung from NSW who was one of this year's winners.
Here is Alice's short video that describes her project.
Another inspiring project came from David Young in Ireland, have a look at David's project that won 1st Place in the “Knowledge Building and Critical Thinking” category.
It’s on again, the annual online science assessment that
brings all year 8 students in NSW, Australia together on one day to do an
online science assessment, the next one is November
13.
Each year we make this happen by using the best cloud
platform technologies available and the latest techniques for building scalable
assessment systems.
Last year we peaked at 500 schools – this year we think we
might go just a little higher, we are also expecting a few more students on
this year, so this year we have 500 Windows Azure processor cores to handle the
demand.
We like to share, so you can watch what’s happening on the
servers as the event unfolds.
