Marketplace Live wins Silver Brandon Hall Excellence in Learning Technology Award

Silver Award recognizes the family of experiential learning tools employing visually rich, realistic online business simulations in marketing, entrepreneurship, and corporate strategy.

For Immediate Release

KNOXVILLE, Tenn./EWORLDWIRE/Nov 11, 2009 --- The Marketplace Live Business Simulation received a Silver Award for Excellence in Learning Technology in the Best Advance in 3-D or Immersive Learning Technology category. The Marketplace Live Business Simulation's win was announced on Thursday, April 29. The winners are listed at Brandon-Hall.com.

The Marketplace Live Business Simulation is not one simulation but a family of visually rich, realistic online business simulations in marketing, entrepreneurship, and corporate strategy. Several hundred universities and colleges around the world use Marketplace Live as an experiential learning tool to make the learning process more effective, and to help their students better understand key business concepts, principles, and ways of thinking. Marketplace Live features a realistic 3D environment, multimedia content and built-in tools for real-time team collaboration. The simulation is made available through Innovative Learning Solutions Inc. of Knoxville, Tenn. More information about Marketplace Live can be found at Marketplace-Live.com.

"We are excited about winning the Silver Excellence award," said Dr. Ernie Cadotte, creator of Marketplace Live and professor of marketing at the University of Tennessee. "It is great to be recognized for our excellent design by an independent and world-renowned e-learning and research organization."

"Our goal is to help students visualize the most important business principles," said Martin Klima, the lead developer for the Marketplace Live simulation. "We want to allow business students to touch and feel the products or ads they design, to see inside the sales outlets they build, and the factory they manage. We want students to experience the results of their business decisions in a way that allows the learning points to really 'stick'.

"To accomplish that goal, we created an interesting, interactive business story that ties the entire experience together. We built realistic characters in various business situations within the simulated 3D world. While the simulation results are still presented in a traditional form, they are also played out through life-like situations rendered in 3D animation. Students experience the specific consequences of their actions in a visual environment of which they are a part. For example, if your firm struggles with poor customer satisfaction, you will experience the reaction of an unhappy customer face-to-face. If one of your executive decisions causes havoc in the factory in China, you will have a very irritated plant manager on the phone to let you know. Such realistic experiences resonate with students on a more personal level, which greatly increases knowledge retention."

"There are literally years worth of work that went into this product that you will not see on the surface. If you looked under the hood, you would find a multi-tier architecture that cleanly separates the business logic from the presentation layer," adds Jozef Briss, a senior developer for Marketplace Live. "New technologies and new devices challenge us to adjust our systems constantly. Our flexible architecture allows us to efficiently adapt the software to the new platforms of the future."

"We have truly pushed the limits of what a Web application can do today. The result is a seamless and easy to use interface that does not stand in the way between the student and the learning content," reflects Peter Kolciter, a senior developer for Marketplace Live. "The addition of real-time virtual teamwork tools and social networking features facilitates both team-building and communication. It makes our simulation an ideal tool for distributed teams."

"To support the demands of the new simulation, we rebuilt many parts of our infrastructure," said Jano Simicka, the ILS infrastructure manager. "We now have a system in place that reliably serves a quickly increasing number of customers."

The Brandon Hall Excellence in Learning Technology Awards are presented by Brandon Hall Research, one of the leading research firms in training and development. The Learning Technology Awards program showcases innovations in the products in the marketplace for creating and managing learning, talent and performance.

"These outstanding tools and systems propel the learning profession forward," said Brandon Hall, Ph.D., chairman of the Awards program. "These innovative products let customers learn faster, better and easier."

The entries were evaluated by independent judges around the world.

About Innovative Learning Solutions Inc. (ILS)

Innovative Learning Solutions Inc. is a leading publisher of online learning solutions for business students and professionals around the world. Ernie Cadotte, creator of Marketplace Live, has been developing its simulation model for more than 25 years. In 2001, ILS released the first fully Web-based business simulation that required no downloads or installation. In January 2009, ILS released the first fully Web-based business simulation with multimedia content and a realistic 3D environment.

About Brandon Hall Research

Brandon Hall, Ph.D. is the CEO of Brandon Hall Research and author of the ground-breaking "Web-Based Training Cookbook." Since 1992, Brandon Hall Research has been providing independent research reports and expert advice on using technology in learning. Brandon Hall Research conducts Awards programs each year to recognize the best ininnovative learning.