News Story

Learning Management Congress – Munich, Germany

Wednesday 19 Oct 2005

The IMC organization held a congress in Munich 10-11th October 2005. The congress is a large, very Germanic, trade-focused, event which helps companies to think about eLearning and management issues. My keynote to this business audience was on live and streaming media.

Before the Congress, the PROLEARN Network of Excellence in professional technology-enhanced learning, held a very interesting workshop on “Future Trends in Professional Learning”.

In the morning we had a strong academic driven view of the field. Dimitra Pappa (NCSR, Greece) gave a view of the Roadmap for professional learning. Yann Denoual (HEC, France) talked us through eLearning markets and market places. Alexander Karapidis (IAO, Germany) talked about linking academia to industry via competence, and Eric Kluijfhout (OUNL, Netherlands) picked up the theme of competence development. The final academic perspective was given by Tapio Koskinnen (HUT, Finland) who discussed the LEONIE-project (Learning in Europe: Observatory on National and International Evolution).

In the afternoon, Industry took over and pushed back the other way. With speakers from Ericsson in Sweden, Paul Landers; from Volkswagen in Germany, Dietmar Albrecht; from Giunti in Italy, Carin Martell. Topics ranged from the upcoming impact of ubuiquity and distributed technologies to the power of human resources management. Finally, Andre Richier finished up the day with a discussion of benchmarking from the EU perspective.

An interesting, multi-faceted event. (The new Technical University Campus in Munich is also pretty interesting to us here in the Open University thinking of building new things…).