Learning Pool LRS Wins MongoDB Open Source Innovation Award

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Chris Dunne, Digital Marketing Manager

Oxford, UK: Learning Pool LRS was today announced as the winner of the Open Source Innovation Award 2016 at the third annual MongoDB Innovation Awards at MongoDB World 2016 in New York.

The MongoDB Innovation Awards celebrate organizations building the world’s most innovative data-driven applications and recognizing those with a transformative impact on their respective industries.

Last year’s winner of the Open Source award was Facebook, and this year saw hundreds of entries across dozens of industries, from startups to Fortune 100 enterprises, which makes Learning Locker’s achievement all the more remarkable.

Learning Pool LRS, owned and developed by Learning Pool (formerly HT2 Labs), the R&D Company for L&D, is a massively scalable Learning Record Store (LRS) designed specifically for the education and learning sector to store, sort and share big learning data. Using the xAPI specification for storing and transferring learning data, Learning Locker is the most installed database of its type globally.

As James Mullaney, Technical Director at HT2 explains, using MongoDB as the data store at the core of Learning Locker has a number of advantages:

“Every learning activity we store is different and the nature of how MongoDB stores data allows us to cope with this complexity. Using the MongoDB Aggregation Framework we allow our users to quickly query data in a way that the xAPI (by itself) does not currently allow. It’s also massively scalable – which enables us meet the need for enterprise levels of storage that our clients require.

MongoDB uses Encryption at REST, making it possible to encrypt the data directly at the point of storage with minimal overhead on speed, which, coupled with excellent compression capabilities we get with WiredTiger, also means data can be compressed to a quarter of its normal size whilst maintaining the ability to query. Again this is beneficial to our clients as reliable, secure storage space doesn’t come cheap.”

Ben Betts, CPO Learning Pool continued:

“It’s been a tremendous year for us at HT2, and for Learning Locker in particular having won a number of high-value, long-term projects and made significant developments to release our second version of the software.

“At HT2 we believe that data and analytics are the key to achieving measurable changes in learning that positively impact bottom-line results. We’re a research and development company at heart, so being recognised for the work that we’re doing in this area is highly rewarding. It’s also fantastic news for the broader Learning Technology community that we’ve been recognised in this way; for once learning tech is leading!”

Learning Locker is also a key, underlying technology in Red Panda (the latest learning product to come out of HT2’s R&D Lab); a personal learning hub that uses data stored in Learning Locker to recommend and guide individuals through personalised learning pathways.

Red Panda also integrates with Learning Pool’s (formerly HT2 Labs) award-winning social learning tool, Learning Pool Platform. This suite of tools works together to offer organisations a complete learning ecosystem that is personalised, social and driven by data.

For the full list of this year’s MongoDB Innovation Award winners, visit mongodb.com.