14/06/2022 | NIDIT visiting Learntec 2022

	by Ramin Siegmund and Albrecht Metzler
	LEARNTEC 2022 took place in Karlsruhe from May 23-25. The international trade fair, including its own trade congress, was held for the 29th time and was once again held on-site and not digitally. At Europe's largest event for digital education in schools, universities and professions, national and international exhibitors presented the latest technologies for digital learning and working. We were there with two colleagues to experience the latest trends and impressions first-hand. The topic of virtual reality and augmented reality has fully arrived in digital education, there is hardly any doubt about that after visiting the fair. There is hardly a stand where VR or AR glasses are not being handled. The topics are enormously diverse: from welder training, emergency medicine and occupational safety to rhetoric training and social learning: there are now applications, services and companies offering potential solutions for almost every topic, specialist area and learning objective. Many of these offerings are already well beyond an alpha status, so you could get a good impression at the fair of what the finished "products" might look like and no longer feel like a beta tester. In addition to the multitude of B2B discussions and product applications, there were also a number of events to take away "en passent", including information corners, the opportunity to create a clone of yourself in augmented reality and, last but not least, the award ceremony for the "delina Award - Innovation Award for Digital Education". It is also noticeable that universities are increasingly making their presence felt at the fair, mostly in cooperation with business organizations or in their own spin-offs. A thematic focus at the fair seems to be the tracking, documentation and feedback of learning performance to the user. Topics such as learning analytics, learning process documentation and AI-driven feedback loops took on increased relevance on the days of the fair. Positive development here: Almost all providers now attach great importance to German data protection compliance! Overall, we look back on LEARNTEC 2022 in a very positive light: the trends are diverse, interesting and anything but sluggish. New contacts to exciting providers and solutions for digital education challenges could be made and will possibly soon be passed on to teachers via NIDIT. We are already looking forward to the next LEARNTEC in 2023, then hopefully in person again, because there was unanimity among many participants about Twitter & Co on one thing: Trying out the devices directly on site, the personal contact in the physical space are still fundamentally important despite Metaverse and Co and cannot be replaced by purely digital formats.
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