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Pearson caters to IT professionals with flash card app

Pearson IT Certification introduced its new Cert Flash Cards application that helps IT professionals interested in pursuing technical certification.

The application is available on the iPhone and iPod touch and will soon be available on the iPad. The company claims that users can download the application if they are looking for accessible, quality preparation tools.

?While flash cards are an effective means to reinforce basic vocabulary and mathematical skills, most of the assessment and practice products for IT certifications are full-blown practice tests ?  utilizing multiple choice question types to replicate the exam environment,? said Brett Bartow, executive editor at Pearson, New York.

?Flash cards are often a simple afterthought for these products,? he said. ?As a result, functionality is very limited ? they tend to simply take multiple choice questions and frame them in context of a flash card format."

Pearson is an education, services and technology company.

Quiz time
Users can quiz themselves on a wide range of IT certifications, including CompTIA, Cisco, Microsoft, CISSP, VMWare.

Additionally consumers are able to enter their own answers, grade answers, create custom flash card sets and view or email score reports.

The application follows the recent availability of the book and library reader applications from Pearson.

?Without the ability to type in an answer, users cannot effectively compare their answers to the real answer for any given card,? Mr. Bartow said. ?In addition, none of these flash card add-ons provide any score reporting capabilities.

?Anyone who is interested in a particular IT certification will find these products to be an invaluable part of their self-study program,? he said.

Here is a screen grab of the application:

Practice test
The new application contains one sample section of cards for an IT certification exam.

To access the remaining flash cards, users can use the in-application purchase feature to buy the full application.

In addition, consumers can navigate the list of exam topics ? black topic listings are unlocked for free while the red topic listings are locked and available for purchase.

The full application features hundreds of flash cards on all exam topics. Users can enter their own answers, create custom question sets and view detailed score reports as well as enter notes on each question.

Here is another screen grab of the application:

This is not Pearson?s first foray into mobile. The company released its first iPhone and iPad applications last month, which let consumers buy additional content chapters within the application.

Pearson claims that the applications were designed to complement its suite of other products such as print books, online reference libraries and video (see story).

?Flash cards have long been an effective way to increase retention of important facts, and this application is perfectly suited to mobile devices such as the iPad, the iPhone and iTouch,? Mr. Bartow said.