Over 400 speakers from 44 countries were featured in a wide range of plenaries, presentations, and vivid discussions. The largest national delegations in numbers of participants hailed from the UK, the Netherlands, and Norway - besides Germany.


It was interesting to observe the fact that the broad palette of famous eLearning providers at ONLINE EDUCA didn't demonstrate any easily generalizable directions in their activities. In other words, the trend is that there is no trend.

At the Berlin event, Fronter (Norway), a European supplier of learning-management systems, announced a new cooperative undertaking with Elluminate. This means that Fronter will now combine synchronic and asynchronic communication possibilities within a single system. With the complete integration of Elluminate, Fronter users can start web conferences, whiteboard functionalities, application sharing, as well as audio and video files directly.


Yet a further European star, Giunti Labs (Italy), showcased new developments in its Hive digital repository technology, which the company acquired from the Australian-Stock- Exchange-quoted company Harvestroad™ in March 2008. In particular, the new HarvestRoad Hive online and mobile-learning authoring plug-ins "Hive Packager"™ and "Hive Mobile"™ were demonstrated, as well as the new SOA architecture favoring state-of-the-art integration with Sakai and Moodle, the leading open-source virtual learning platforms, using Hive's advanced DR technology for managing, sharing, and federating multi-channel learning contents across content providers and educational networks.


Another European major on hand was Germany's IMC AG. Its representative explained, "Securing knowledge transfer and return on investment are the key challenges in today's continuing education". Therefore in its Electronic Performance Support System (EPSS) LiveContext, IMC provides pinpoint information to improve quality and increase productivity and speed to competency. Instead of offering learning content in the form of courses, LiveContext is integrated into the software applications themselves.


The required help and support functions are directly provided within the application, enabling employees to find and call up all relevant information with a click and always allowing them to know what to do, even when they are faced with new challenges and changes. The system is convenient in that it provides employees with tailored support in Windows and web applications, in CRM and, in particular, in ERP solutions such as SAP.


The American company Blackboard showed a combination of Web 2.0 and "project next generation". As the firm's Timothy Collins explained, the integration of WebCT and Blackboard systems into a complex learning-management system nowadays will be enhanced by a new version of a bookmarking network that contains a user interface with drag and drop possibilities and blog and journal functions. The new version should accompany students through the academic year. Also, network services like Facebook, Google, and others will be integrated directly. "Students can select what ever they need," Tim Collins explained. The new version will be available in a few weeks.


IBM
primarily presented its own experience in Web 2.0 transformation and documented its cutting edge in this field with numbers. IBM's internal BluePages application demonstrated the breadth of its profiles. BluePages holds over 590,000 profiles and serves over four million searches per month. The IBM Community Map hosts more than 1,890 online communities of interest. In IBM forums there are more than 147,000 threads with over one million entries.


In the last twelve months, IBM's BlogCentral supported 64,000 employees with 15,200 weblogs services. They provided 133,000 entries and 135,000 comments, as well as 31,800 unique tags. More than 2,000 blogs are considered "very active". WikiCentral is the central access point for Wikis in IBM and is used by two thirds of the employees. Every work day there more than 70,000 employees accessing up to 282,000 pages out of more than 6.3 million Wiki pages. Furthermore, the IBM internal bookmark-sharing system has 655,600 bookmarks with 1,674,000 tags and a user population of 13,900.