SWOT – Smart Sparrow Adaptive eLearning Platform

Smart Sparrow Adaptive eLearning PlatformTM was developed by a research group in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in 2011.

The platform was designed to support their three principles of Adaptive eLearning

  1. Promote Learning by doing.
  2. Be intelligent and adaptive.
  3. Empower the teacher.

Their Labmaker software has been deployed in a number of educational domains such as medicine, nursing, exercise physiology, pathology, statistics, aerospace and mechanics. You can see more details about these case studies on their website.

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Strengths

  • Helps reduce cost for student training in traditional lab environments.
  • Provides scenarios and situations impossible to deliver in traditional learning environments.

Weaknesses 

  • They are based from Australia; this might limit their exposure to some of the biggest markets for their product in North America, Europe and Asia.
  • Need high speed internet connection and decent hardware for graphical rendering of imagery.

Opportunities

  • They have just started to receive grants and funding as well as customers – for now there is a large untapped market share worldwide for their product.
  • They can leverage the technology to move into other educations disciplines than just mainly science, medicine, and engineering.
  • Currently only offered in English – many other linguistic market possibilities exist.
  • Currently aimed at higher education institutes but could be also used in other sectors such as K-12 and within corporations.

Threats

  • Being a digital and virtual platform its reasonably easy for competitors can copy and introduce the same type of functionality into their existing products relatively quickly.
  • Many customers rely on government funding.
  • Could end up being purchased by a bigger ed tech company and incorporated into their exiting suite of products.
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