More accolades for Tuscany’s TRIO web-based learning system
TRIO, the web-based learning system in use in Italy’s Tuscany Region, is helping individuals enhance their skills; companies maintain their competitive advantage, and other organisations operate more efficiently and provide greater value for money to their stakeholders.
This news was given to some 250 people at a recent conference, called ‘The TRIO System for Competitiveness’. The conference, held in Florence, Italy, reviewed case studies relating to Training Innovation Research and (job) Orientation (TRIO) - the web learning system of the Tuscan Region (www.progettotrio.it) - which makes available, to citizens, public and private organisations, a free catalogue of over 1,600 training courses covering 16 thematic areas.
To date, over 550,000 of these courses have been delivered to some 195,000 users since TRIO’s inception in 2002 – and some 65,400 people used the system last year. In 2006, the European Commission awarded the TRIO project the European Label for language teaching through innovation and effective teaching practices.
The event was organised by the Region of Tuscany in collaboration with its project technology partners, including eXact Learning Solutions, which is one of the world’s leading providers of learning content management (LCMS) and digital repository (DR) solutions.
A key theme of the conference was that investment in human capital (job related knowledge and skills) is vital in establishing and maintaining a competitive edge in today’s labour market – especially in the light of increasing international competition and the continuing, challenging economic situation. There was agreement that, in Tuscany, the use of learning technologies – in the TRIO system – is playing a major role in helping people and organisations in the region to improve their performance standards and more than meet European standards in professional qualifications.
"We’re now reaping the benefits of this project, some ten years since its inception,” said Gianni Biagi, Training and Orientation Director for the Tuscany Region. “In this, the project contributes to implementing European policies on lifelong learning.
“In addition, fuelled by the continuing success of TRIO, we’re now involved in similar, on-going projects with other Italian regions - such as the Marche region, which is working on de facto implementation of the platform and with Emilia Romagna, where there is collaboration based on knowledge sharing. Moreover, we’ll soon be announcing the Tuscany Region’s participation in the Copernicus Project, launched by the Province of Bolzano.
“In other words, our goals include the transfer of this best practice – as evidenced in TRIO - to other contexts and the development of synergies,” he said.
Fabrizio Cardinali, the Chair of the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG) and CEO of eXact learning solutions, North America, commented: “Italy and, indeed, Europe must move swiftly to fill any gaps in training matter in order to continue being competitive, compared with the world’s emerging economies.
“Web learning platforms - thanks to interoperability, testing and certification of competencies as per common standards - enable people to customise their learning materials to their particular needs. This is particularly valuable where the learning is delivered, ‘just enough’ and ‘just-in-time’, via mobile devices.
“TRIO is an important milestone and should be considered as a reference start point for other training and inclusion initiatives,” he added.
"TRIO represents ‘excellence’ in the world of e-learning because it addresses the continuous evolution of training needs successfully,” explained Gianfranco Simoncini, the Tuscany Region’s Minister for Education, Vocational Training and Labour.
“It meets the growing demand for training, providing opportunities for re-training, knowledge increase or re-orientation, to ensure the business skills needed to succeed. In this, it supports and sustains the training needs of public and private bodies, promoting the development process of e-government and contributes to the creation of an integrated regional system of education, training and work.”
Albino Bertoletti, President of eXact learning solutions, added: "We’re proud of our technology partnership with the Tuscany Region and we’re continuing to devote our expertise to this project. This means that we’re continually working to make the TRIO platform easy to access and use, constantly updated with top quality contents and compliant with interoperability standards, such as SCORM.”
Under leadership from eXact learning solutions, the TRIO project consortium is using an extended implementation of Moodle as the core of the TRIO platform. This is integrated with eXact learning solutions’ HarvestRoad Hive DR system 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 can 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 in Italy, Europe and worldwide - thus fostering maximum reuse and sharing of the produced work-based curricula.
TRIO is 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 administrations in Italy, Spain and beyond.
TRIO’s presence on the two main social networks - Facebook and Twitter - increases the chance to disseminate real-time news and events and allows users to interact with others working within a community. Thanks to a new educational podcast, it is also possible for users to deepen their understanding of various topics, personalise their learning path and learn while they are on the move.
End