Education Technology
Businesswire | July 10, 2023
YuJa, Inc., a leader in ed-tech solutions, has introduced a number of new and exciting features across its portfolio of higher education offerings, which include the flagship YuJa Enterprise Video Platform, YuJa Panorama Digital Accessibility platform, YuJa Engage Student Response System, YuJa Verity Test Proctoring, and YuJa Himalayas Enterprise Archiving Platform.
“Our goal is to continually innovate to meet the evolving needs of our customers,” said Nathan Arora, Chief Business Officer at YuJa, Inc. “With these new features, updates, and enhancements, we aim to empower educators and institutions with innovative tools that foster engaging learning environments and enable seamless collaboration. We are dedicated to supporting the ever-changing landscape of higher education and ensuring our products remain at the forefront of educational technology.”
Highlighted feature introductions and updates are listed below.
YuJa Enterprise Video Platform
A number of Enterprise Video Platform improvements were implemented. Highlights include:
The need for third-party cookies has been eliminated, which simplified product use and enhances the privacy and security for institutions as they access the Video Platform from within their learning management system.
A new umbrella system infrastructure has been deployed to support systems of higher education with multiple campuses or institutions using a single Video Platform instance. Administrators can manage system-level deployment and designate sub-administrators at an individual college level.
A new client-side Microsoft Teams app complements the cloud-side Teams integration, which creates a streamlined video-sharing workflow between Teams and the Video Platform.
YuJa Panorama Digital Accessibility Platform
YuJa Panorama Digital Accessibility Platform has a long list of new features to help streamline accessibility across institutions. Some accessibility enhancements include:
A new gradient reader helps reduce unnecessary eye movements and increases the reader’s focus by providing a guiding color gradient to facilitate a smooth shift between lines of text.
YuJa Panorama provides “How-to-Fix” guides to help instructors fix accessibility concerns. Now, guides can now be edited with new text, images, and links, and each issue is now accompanied by both a video tutorial and a link to web content accessibility guidelines.
The Alternatives Formats Menu has an updated UI and minimized steps to view a preferred format.
YuJa Verity Test Proctoring Platform
Among the top updates to the YuJa Verity Test Proctoring Platform include the following:
YuJa Verity users can now monitor third-party assessments across all learning management systems, which provides secure testing environments within the Verity LTI app.
A new lockdown app has been launched. The app works seamlessly with Verity Live Proctoring to ensure students can’t end recordings during an assessment and enforces strict measures to prevent common methods of bypassing proctor settings.
Instructors can now create custom profiles for their proctoring settings, which can be applied to upcoming proctored tests.
YuJa Engage Student Response System
The YuJa Engage Student Response System also saw a host of new and updated features, including:
A new mobile application for IOS and Android has been introduced to their respective app stores to provide on-the-go access to polls and results for both students and instructors.
Surveys have been updated to seamlessly integrate with the gradebook and new question types have been added.
Gradebook results can be manually adjusted within YuJa Engage, which allows instructors to tailor the grading process to better align with individual student progress and ensure accurate evaluation of academic performance.
ABOUT YUJA, INC.
YuJa is a leader in ed-tech solutions. Our platforms provide organizations of all sizes with the tools to educate, engage, inspire and collaborate. We serve learning enterprises within all sectors, including higher-ed, K-12, government, healthcare, non-profit and corporate. We have legal headquarters in Delaware with primary U.S. offices in Silicon Valley, California, and Canadian offices in Toronto.
Read More
Talent Development
Businesswire | August 17, 2023
As part of its commitment to delivering an interactive, standards-aligned curriculum for K–12 students, Stride, Inc.is now offering more content options that feature music from award-winning producers, singers, and rappers.
Through a unique partnership with Doggyland—a 3D animated series created by world renowned superstar, songwriter, producer, and rapper Snoop Dogg—Stride has curated collections of video content, interactive lessons, and practice activities within its Stride Learning Hub: a digital teaching tool that allows educators to customize their respective courses with Stride assessments and other learning tools.
“At Stride, we understand the importance of meeting students where they are,” said Niyoka McCoy, Stride’s Chief Learning Officer. “As countless studies have shown, the art of music can improve students’ reading, comprehension, and memory skills. Through this partnership, we’re supporting students’ learning goals, keeping them engaged, and helping them have fun along the way.”
In each Doggyland lesson, the cast of vibrant characters is led by Bow Wizzle, voiced by Snoop Dogg, the main character who serves as the adult mentor to the rest of the cast. Students can engage in topics—related to letter and number recognition, sharing, colors, the importance of accepting others and practicing good habits, among other subjects—through the use of interactive tools such as drawing, drag and drop tools, voice recording, and offline activities.
“Snoop and I are so proud to partner with Stride on this exciting collection of innovative, family-friendly musically-based content,” said Claude Brooks, Co-Creator and Executive Producer of Doggyland. “Through this partnership, even more students will learn the social, emotional, and cognitive skills they need to succeed in the classroom and beyond.”
Stride educators can select resources from the Doggyland collection based on each learner’s specific needs and preferences. This includes video content, brain breaks, and full lessons.
About Stride, Inc.
At Stride, Inc. we are reimagining learning—where learning is lifelong, deeply personal, and prepares learners for tomorrow. The company has transformed millions of people’s teaching and learning experiences by providing innovative, high-quality, tech-enabled education solutions, curriculum, and programs directly to students, schools, the military, and enterprises in primary, secondary, and postsecondary settings. Stride is a premier provider of K-12 education for students, schools, and districts, including career learning services through middle and high school curriculum. For adult learners, Stride delivers professional skills training in healthcare and technology, as well as staffing and talent development for Fortune 500 companies. Stride has delivered millions of courses over the past decade and serves learners in all 50 states and more than 100 countries.
About Snoop Dogg
An Entertainment Industry Mogul and Entrepreneur, Snoop Dogg has reigned for nearly three decades as an unparalleled force who has raised the bar as a globally recognized innovator. Snoop Dogg is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, actor, record producer, DJ, media personality, businessman and Icon. In addition to his extensive work in music, Snoop Dogg is a serial entrepreneur with endeavors in Web 3.0, tech, entertainment, lifestyle, global consumer brands and food/beverage industries.
Read More
Education Technology
PRnewswire | July 18, 2023
Anthology, a leading provider of education solutions that support the entire learner lifecycle, today announced its future of incorporating generative AI capabilities into its ecosystem of EdTech solutions in collaboration with Microsoft.
By using Microsoft's advanced AI technologies with Anthology's purpose-built suite of higher education solutions, Anthology is bringing forth new capabilities to help institutions personalize learning journeys, improve efficiencies and operations, and bolster recruitment and enrollment programs.
Anthology selected Microsoft as its AI solution partner because of Microsoft's vision and leadership in cloud AI developer services, long-standing relationship, and shared commitment to responsible AI by design.
Leveraging the power of AI across its solution suite is a key differentiator for Anthology and core to its mission to provide dynamic, data-informed experiences to the global education community through Anthology Intelligent Experiences™.
"We are thrilled to be partnering with Microsoft to drive the next wave of innovation in education and open a world of possibilities for the global education community," said JD White, Chief Product Officer at Anthology. "While other vendors might be looking at AI within a point solution, Anthology is assessing the power of generative AI technology across our vast stack of EdTech solutions. By thoughtfully integrating AI into our ecosystem, we can harness its power to foster innovation.
The collaboration with Microsoft ensures these solutions are scalable, secure, and seamlessly integrated into existing educational ecosystems, making them easily accessible to institutions worldwide."
"We're excited about our collaboration with Anthology to power new AI solutions for education with a shared commitment to responsible use," said Serena Sacks-Mandel, Global Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft Education. "Anthology is a proven partner that has consistently demonstrated innovation and is aligned to our mission of empowering education through technology."
Anthology's collaboration with Microsoft represents a significant step forward in delivering state-of-the-art AI capabilities tailored to the unique needs of higher education institutions. By integrating Microsoft's AI features into Anthology's purpose-built higher education solutions, institutions can unlock new opportunities for personalized student engagement, advanced data analytics, and streamlined administrative processes. For example, using Microsoft's Natural Language Processing capabilities, institutions can gain deeper insights from unstructured data sources, such as student feedback, surveys, and communications, empowering administrators to make data-informed decisions to improve student success and satisfaction.
Anthology unveiled new real-world applications of AI capabilities today at Anthology Together within its Blackboard Learn learning management system that are using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, including:
• A course-builder aide for instructors that create draft modules, titles, descriptions, etc. The integration of Azure OpenAI Service will enable instructors to streamline content creation processes, saving valuable time and effort.
• Content-based test generation. AI-powered algorithms analyze a document's content and quickly generate a diverse set of questions. This allows educators to allocate more time to other important tasks, such as lesson planning and individual student support.
• Rubric creation. Rubric creation powered by AI streamlines the rubric creation process and ensures consistency and fairness in evaluating student performance.
Educators will have the ability to customize and fine-tune these AI-generated rubrics according to specific learning objectives and assessment criteria, providing a balance between automation and instructor expertise.
These features are built following Anthology's commitment to responsible AI use, ensuring that human judgment and ethical considerations always guide AI-facilitated decision-making and to use AI as a tool to enable positive outcomes while respecting privacy, fairness, and transparency. Learn more about Anthology's approach to ethical and responsible AI use.
Anthology uses Azure for cloud services and the Microsoft Power Platform for business intelligence solutions. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is the foundation of its customer relationship management (CRM), Anthology® Reach, and Finance and Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions, which will allow Anthology to use Dynamics 365 Copilot features to accelerate innovation. Anthology also harnesses the power of Microsoft 365's collaboration and productivity tools within many products, including its learning management system (LMS), Blackboard® Learn.
Microsoft awarded Anthology the Microsoft Business Applications Inner Circle award in 2022/2023 and 2021/2022. The award recognizes Outstanding Achievements in EdTech and Anthology's rank in the echelon of Microsoft's Business Applications global network of partners.
About Anthology
Anthology offers the largest EdTech ecosystem on a global scale for education, supporting more than 150 million users in 80 countries. With a mission to provide dynamic, data-informed experiences to the global education community through Anthology Intelligent Experiences™, we help learners, leaders and educators achieve their goals by offering over 60 SaaS products and services designed to advance learning.
Read More