TATA Interactive Systems

Diwali 2006 Pics Are Up!

We recently celebrated the festival of lights and we would like to share some snapshots with you. Please click here to view the photo album.

TIS and Granada Learning win BETT Award 2006 for "Simulation Explorer"

We are happy to announce that Simulation Explorer, an educational CD-ROM developed by us for Granada Learning, has recently won the British Educational Technology and Training (BETT) Award 2006 for Primary Science. 

Designed to introduce children to computer simulations, Simulation Explorer allows children to explore situations that would be difficult or impossible to in practice. It proves especially valuable for real-life activities that are difficult to mimic or take a long time to complete. The exploration aspect encourages children to collaborate with each other, investigate different outcomes, develop discussion skills and progress their high order thinking skills. Please click here to see the demonstration video.

The Mumbai Marathon 2006: Geetha's Perspective

I was part of the TIS team that took part in the Mumbai Marathon 2006 yesterday (15-Jan-06). While the number of participants, with apparently more than 20,000 people running in the different categories, was overwhelming, what to me was even more amazing was the crowd. There were spectators on all sides, dressed for the occasion, craning necks to get a view of the predominantly amateur runners, and waving handmade placards, flags and the like. Some of them apparently even bought biscuits and water off their own money and provided these to the runners.

What made these people wake up early on a Sunday morning, get on to the train or bus or whatever modes of transport they took (the roads were mostly closed for private vehicles, so that could have been an option for most of these folks), and stand in the middle of the hot roads, cheering people they don’t know from Adam? What’s it in for them?

Is there a lesson we can learn from the marathon, from an e-learning perspective? We keep spending a lot of time and energy trying to build in the “what’s in it for me” element into the design of our products. Is there something here? Or am I just forcing connections where there are none?

(Geetha Krishnan heads Instructional Design at Tata Interactive Systems)

Helping Overcome Learning Disabilities

What do Tom Cruise, Whoopi Goldberg, Walt Disney, Winston Churchill, and Alexander Graham Bell have in common?

Learning disability.

Learning disability is a life-long disorder that affects the manner in which individuals with average or above average intelligence select, retain, and express information. It reflects a difficulty in encoding and decoding information as it travels between the senses and the brain. Learning disabilities are also termed as ‘learning differences,’ based on the fact that certain individuals learn differently—they aren’t unable to learn, but respond best to ways of learning that are different from traditional teaching methods.

Although several products are available for the identification and remediation of learning disabilities, most of these are either unable to sustain the progress of a disabled child or not aligned to government standards. To overcome this limitation, we develop end-to end solutions that screen and identify children with learning disabilities, and offer remedial action as well as a tracking system to monitor their progress. For a detailed overview of TIS’s involvement and solutions please click here .

TIS’ products have not only been endorsed by names like Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) – US, Granada Learning, Nelson Thornes, and Steck Vaughn, but have also won international recognition by the way of prestigious awards including Best Product Award at British Educational Training and Technology (BETT) Show 2004, in the Special Needs category, for nferNELSON’s Dyscalculia Screener.

In India, TIS mentors the Learning Disability Center at Sion Hospital—the only center in the State of Maharashtra, approved by the State Government to certify students with learning disabilities. Beyond the salaries and the stationery, we help the clinic with a hands-on approach—whether it’s by streamlining the day-to-day functioning or finding solutions to the scores of issues that crop up from time to time. We also share our reservoir of educational software, including the award-winning Jojo in Numberland, to help the children discover the joys of learning.

Run for Learning Disability: On January 15, we are participating in the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon 2006. Leading the way is our Head of Japan Operations, Mr Tadashi Horiuchi (image on right) , who will run the Full Marathon. Tadashi is flying in to Mumbai from Tokyo especially for the event. He is one of more than 50 TISians who will take part in the marathon, in three categories – Full Marathon (42 km), Half Marathon (21 km) and the Dream Run (7 km), with our CEO, Mr Sanjaya Sharma himself being part of the TIS Dream Run team. We hope that our participation will reflect our commitment towards helping those with Learning Disabilities.

New Additions To Our Family

I am happy to announce our acquisition of two companies - Tertia Edusoft AG in Switzerland and Tertia Edusoft GmbH in  Germany – from the Tertia Group, a leading provider of Human Resources Management solutions in Germany.

Tertia Edusoft AG is the market leader in  Switzerland in the development of regulatory and compliance training solutions for the Banking, Financial Services, Insurance, Professional Services, Logistics and Telecom sectors.

Tertia Edusoft GmbH’s core competence lies in designing management simulations, through their proprietary product line, TOPSIM – the no. 1 simulation product in  Germany. TOPSIM has been successfully implemented in business education and professional training for more than 20 years in German-speaking countries, and is currently being used by more than 1,000 customers.

This is a significant step for us in our quest for global leadership in e-learning. These two companies provide us the impetus to pursue high growth opportunities in the European market. Now we can offer an even wider range of offerings to our customers worldwide.

Tertia Edusoft GmbH’s TOPSIM range works in synergy with TIS’s strong global presence in the simulations segment. TIS has already developed a library of about 200 SimBLs™ (Simulation-based Learning Objects) on diverse topics – from Management and Accounting to Business Ethics and People Management  – that are being used by more than 60,000 students and 25,000 other licensees around the world.

With the coming together of SimBLs™ and TOPSIM, we are now poised to become a world leader in simulations.

-Sanjaya

(Sanjaya Sharma is CEO, Tata Interactive Systems)