The mobile phone is part of every day life, and not only in the developed world. In many developing and threshold countries, mobile phones are the only functioning communication infrastructure and often double as bank, municipal office and now as classroom.

The project of the United Nation Environment Programme (UNEP) and common sense – eLearning & training consultants GmbH addresses the infrastructure challenges in these countries, where most of the communication is taking place by GSM voice and SMS services and not many PDAs, smartphones or broadband applications exist. Hence, simple learning solutions have to be offered via the existing GSM networks.

The project I-Call, which was awarded „Best International eLearning Project“ at the German Education Congress and Fair „Didacta“ is using the existing technology and offers interactive learning sequences in the format of audio soap operas, which can be used from any mobile phone.

More information (in German) at the eLearning Journal site.

common sense is winner of the European eLearning Award eureleA for the category Best Project Impact with I-Call, our mobile Learning suite. The award ceremony and "crowing" of the winner took place on January 31 in Karlsruhe, Germany at the Learntec conference.

The eureleA – European Award for Technology Supported Learning - is a prestigious contest on the European level, which honours outstanding examples of teaching and learning by digital media since 2004.

Photo: Christian Gmelin, GIZ

common sense was present at Online Educa Berlin 2011 from 30th of November until the 2nd of December! (Booth number C95)

On the 1st of December we initiated a meeting on the development of eXeLearning. During this meeting, we contacted organisations, who are interested in a further development of the eXeLearning authoring tool. This side meeting took place in the room 'Zille' from 2 pm to 3 pm.

We gave a presentation at the conference on the 2nd of December 2011. common sense consultant Manfred Freisitzer presented “Dialog Models for Developing Interactive Voice Response for Audio-Based M-Learning Applications” in the context of “Mobile Learning Applications for All” (MOB53) from 11:45am to 1:15pm.