DECOM 2008 debates the future for educational publishing

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) November 10, 2008 -- According to Vijay Kumar, Senior Associate Dean and Director of the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – and an advisor to India’s National Knowledge Commission – the traditional education model has been based on scarcity and assumed limited educational resources.

Today, he said, the development and availability of open education resources are challenging these assumptions and suggest that that model is changing. This movement is making learning materials more widely accessible – although there are issues related to quality and secondary use, to be addressed.

Kumar was addressing over 100 top level executives - from the learning content industry, international publishing firms, corporate training providers and academic stakeholders engaged in both publishing and open courseware initiatives in schools, universities and corporate training, together with Government policy makers throughout Europe – who were debating the future of the learning content industry and, in particular, its ability to adapt to, and exploit fully, a new generation of educational content production, management, sharing and distribution models.

The debate took place in Sestri Levante, Italy, at the end of October – at The Digital Educational Content Marketplaces conference (DECOM 2008). The event was hosted by leading learning and mobile content management solution provider, Giunti Labs, and the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG). The event’s sponsors were Cegos, Plateau, Cisco, IBM, AxMediaTech - AXMEDIS and SIF Association.

The results of delegates’ deliberations will be summarised in ‘The Sestri DECOM Declaration’. Intended for the EU Commission, the Declaration will outline suggested policy actions to support a transition towards digital content marketplaces for educational publishing in Europe.

Other speakers included Judy Brown, Mobile Learning Researcher at the Institute for Simulation and Training, the University of Central Florida and the founder of the Academic ADL SCORM Co-Lab; Spyridon Pilos, of the European Commission; ELIG’s Sectrary General, Richard Straub, and Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO of Giunti Labs.

In addition, there were educational publishing case studies from Joel Greenberg, of the Open University (OU); Adam Black, of Pearson Education; Ulrich Schmid, of Scoyo GmbH; Bob Bolick, of McGraw-Hill; Tim Hawkins, of Elsevier, and Willem van Valkenburg, of the Delft University of Technology.

Cardinali set the tone for the conference by emphasising that the world economy is changing, with increasing challenges to competitiveness in world markets coming from Eastern economies. He said: “The key to competing globally is innovation and being creative in the application of that innovation.”

e-learning     educational publishing