Today I attended the exhibition of the OEB in Berlin at the Intercontinental Hotel. I only visited the exhibition, which was free because the fee for the conference it self would have been to much to bear (roughly 480€). I visited some of exhibitors and will here summarize my experience.

ITNedu

The company is a young startup based in London, specializing in providing access to video content for educational purposes. The problem they try to solve is the often complicated matter of finding the right video content for a learning course, especially if you take in account complicated issues around searching, finding and accessing the content. They currently provide videos they license from various sources on different topics as well as an editorial service of tagging, finding and aggregating of videos with human help (“education professionals”).

numworx

The company is a spin-off of an institute of the Utrecht University. They developed interactive mathematics tools which they use in their own learning management system but also are available for other platforms like Moodle. A tutor can create courses with a various set of interactive elements. For example equitation (“solve for x”) have been very explanatory with an scale and coins on both sides, as well as bags full of money with an unknown sum in it (the x). All the shown interactive elements have been embedded in the LMS and have been part of quizzies. An additional point to mention is the platform-agnostic nature of the interactive elements.

Urkund

The company is Stockholm based and provides anti-plagiarism software. In the provided leaflet they ranked top of the compared anti plagiarism software. Yet they still had “only” 95 out of 130 points in effectiveness and therefore “adequate”. Side note: The test was initiated by the professor I have the course with. After I introduced myself (including the university) I got immediately asked if I know the professor which took the tests.

Unfortunately they could not tell anything about the technical part of software (the algorithms are secret and also the exhibitor had no knowledge about it). What I do learned is that the software not detects plagiarism but similarities between different texts. And this obviously includes only digital texts. Therefore the plagiarism of “offline-text” is harder to detect.

Entropy Knowledge Network

The Italian based company provides augmented reality and serious gaming environments. They showed their solution for an augmented reality tool in use in a hospital to train nurses. The nurses could see hazards in the hospital and additional information on the screen added on top of the video feed. They also could add data on the tool. The second product of them is serious learning in the corporate environment. They have an editor with which they can create games. The showed a serious game for change management and one for problem management. Both included custom stories, background, characters and quizzes.

Darim Vision

The company provides broadcasting systems. For the learning context they showed an (in their words) “affordable” solution for institutions. The showed system consisted of two cameras, two displays and several special video equipment. In a live demo I could attend, I was the “moderator” of an video instruction course and could easily switch between video files, power point slides and live video feeds. The whole content was embedded in an virtual moderation room and my image was included via green screen.

Summary

The OEB exhibition was interesting, even if it isn’t my primary focus of interest.