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
- Promote Learning by doing.
- Be intelligent and adaptive.
- 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.
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.
Ranvir 10:01 pm on October 28, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I like the concept of adaptive learning especially because it is learner centric. When I looked at some of the sample tutorials, the product seems to be Flash template based product that allows you do develop interactive animation and provide feedback. Their concept of being adaptive seems to be confined to providing feedback based on the user actions. This feature is common in most of the professionally designed e-learning courses developed using popular desktop authoring software. I wonder if there is anything particular about this software platform that stands out as compared to the competition?
In threats, you can also add the inability to be accessed on mobile devices.
melissaayers 4:28 am on October 29, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Ranvir,
Thanks for you feedback. I agree that I do not find their product offers anything particularly innovative (technologically speaking) in the way they implement their platform that other providers cannot copy or use as well.
To find out if there is anything particular that the platform does compared to its competition I would need to spend some more time doing competitor analysis sorry, so for now I can not answer your question.
From what I understand the labs & activities created with their software are able to be viewed & used from mobile devices.
Thanks