Talent Development
PRnewswire | July 13, 2023
UWorld, a worldwide leader in online learning tools for high-stakes exams, today announced the launch of its U.K. Medical Licensing Assessment® (UKMLA®) test preparation resources. Aligned to the MLA Examination Blueprint, UWorld's new UKMLA AKT QBank provides educators and students with over a thousand clinically relevant questions developed by practicing doctors to complement existing medical curriculum.
The UKMLA will be a new requirement for all medical students graduating in the academic year 2024-2025, replacing the Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board (PLAB) exam. The exam will assess the fundamental knowledge, abilities, and behaviors required to practice safely as a doctor in the U.K. International Medical Graduate (IMG) students that wish to practice medicine in the U.K. will be required to take the MLA starting in January 2024 and U.K. medical students will be required to sit for the MLA starting with the 2024-2025 academic year.
Designed to help students build effective study habits and improve test-taking endurance, UWorld offers practice questions that help prepare them for their high-stakes exams. UKMLA Study tools include vivid, context-specific illustrations and animations that deepen understanding of critical concepts. For each answer choice, UWorld provides concise, detailed rationales that describe the clinical reasoning behind correct and incorrect answers. Personalized performance reports and customizable flashcards ensure students recognize areas of weakness to help create efficient study sessions that maximize impact.
For educators, UWorld provides tools that can be customized to supplement their medical curriculum. Formative and summative assessments can be built using UWorld's 1,500+ question bank. These questions are also easily integrated into presentation format for classroom learning. UWorld's gradebook and reporting tools for teachers provides valuable insight into classroom performance to easily identify knowledge gaps to ensure early-stage remediation and support. Additionally, students are able to continue learning on their own with access to the self-study student AKT QBank.
"We are thrilled to offer U.K. medical students and educators our award-winning tools to help them succeed on the UKMLA," said Chandra S. Pemmasani, M.D., Founder and CEO of UWorld. "The expansion to the U.K. market is a natural next step after supporting more than 90% of all U.S. medical students in their preparation for the USMLE for more than 15 years. We are proud to offer content that is meticulously developed by subject matter experts, which underscores our commitment to providing resources of exceptional quality."
UWorld aims to make difficult topics easy to understand so that learners at all levels are empowered to succeed in the testing room and to accomplish their career goals.
About UWorld
UWorld is the worldwide leader in online learning to prepare for high-stakes exams. Since 2003, UWorld has helped millions of undergraduate, graduate, and professional students prepare for their exams. At the core of UWorld's mission is an obsession with quality so that students receive only the best in learning resources. Whether students are preparing for the, ACT®, SAT®, College Board®, AP®, CFA®, CPA, MBE®, MCAT®, NAPLEX®/MPJE®/CPJE, NCLEX®, PANCE/PANRE, COMLEX®, USMLE®, ABIM®, or ABFM®, UWorld ensures success by using active learning methods. With challenging practice questions that mirror the real tests and unrivaled explanations, students can efficiently and effectively prepare for every topic on their exams.
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Talent Development
PRnewswire | August 24, 2023
Noodle, higher education's leading strategy, services and technology partner, has completed the acquisition of Meteor Learning, a Certified B edtech corporation based in Burlington, Massachusetts.
Noodle, also a Certified B corporation, welcomes Meteor Learning's higher education and employer partners into its network. This addition strengthens Noodle's ability to help its partners be more resilient, responsive and efficient.
William Rieders and Donna Ritchie, Meteor's founders, will join the Noodle leadership team and will head Noodle's consulting practice, driving strategic insights and operational effectiveness for Noodle partners.
"Meteor extends our capacity and reach, and I am very excited to work with Bill and Donna, who bring tremendous insight and experience to the team," said John Katzman, Noodle's founder and CEO. "This acquisition will expand our consulting practice with leadership and expertise, methodologies and proven results to solve a unique challenge – how does higher ed best leverage technology and data to execute against their strategic goals?"
With this acquisition, Noodle now supports more than 65 top US and UK universities through aligned learning design, marketing, recruiting, support, strategy and technology services. Noodle provides these services, along with internal resources at its partner universities, to address challenges and opportunities that higher ed faces.
"This acquisition will provide Meteor Learning partners with additional scale, expanded services and innovative new models to support greater flexibility, efficiency and internal capacity building," said William Rieders. "Universities are looking for a strategy, services and technology partner to help navigate the rapidly changing post-secondary market. The combination of the two organizations gives us that much more capacity to be their strategic partner."
Meteor's focus on skills-based programs provides a strong catalyst for Noodle's University-to-Employer service, addressing some of the most significant workforce challenges in such areas as Nursing and Education.
About Noodle
Noodle is higher education's leading strategy, services and technology partner. Founded in 2013, Noodle has developed infrastructure and online enrollment growth for some of the best academic institutions in the world. Our vision is "to empower universities to change the world." We achieve this vision by offering our partners various products and services that help them become more resilient, responsive, efficient and interconnected. Noodle is a Certified B edtech corporation.
About Meteor
Meteor Learning is a leader in addressing the vast skills gap. Meteor is uniquely positioned to serve learners with its broad portfolio of skills-based programming developed and validated with higher education and employer partners. Led by seasoned educational technology and service executives, Meteor Learning is a high-growth company with deep expertise in serving the needs of adult learners. Meteor Learning is a Certified B Corporation, Boston Business Journal Fast 50 Company and Inc. 5000 award winner.
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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.
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Corporate Education and Training
Send2Press News wire | July 11, 2023
Edupoint® Educational Systems announced today that Bethlehem Area School District (BASD) has selected the company’s industry-leading Synergy® Student Education Platform for its K 12 student data management needs. The district’s solution will include Synergy Student Information System, Synergy Online Registration, Synergy MTSS, and Synergy Special Education, and will be hosted in the Synergy AWS Cloud environment. BASD serves over 13,300 students across 22 schools in the Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania.
Bethlehem district leadership assembled a team to explore current industry offerings and evaluate their ability to offer improvements in efficiency and effectiveness. Over a period of six months, 67 participants representing a wide variety of roles at all levels of the organization – including secretaries, teachers, principals, assistant principals, and applications specialists, in addition to the district technology team – contributed feedback on the solutions under consideration.
After extensive evaluation, including hosting week-long software demonstrations with three finalists, the team selected Synergy based on a number of key factors, including the following:
• Integrated student information, special education, and MTSS management
• Streamlining of special education and MTSS processes
• Robust query, reporting, and decision support tools
• Timely, reliable data • Federal and state reporting capabilities
• An established and growing presence in Pennsylvania
The district also sought a vendor with a long-term commitment to building and supporting its solutions in-house – a criterion that only Edupoint was able to meet.
“We didn’t want multiple separate systems,” said Marie Bachman, Chief Technology Officer at BASD. “We wanted to give our teachers an improved user experience, greater access to students’ special education information, and a better system for MTSS – all of which will enhance their ability to support students. Teachers are excited about these modules, which work together and are built right into the interface that they will already be using for everyday tasks.”
With Synergy, Bethlehem Area School District is getting a student data management system that will aid in eliminating unnecessary data-entry and integration busywork so stakeholders can focus their time on higher priorities, including supporting students and improving learning outcomes,” said Rob Wilson, Edupoint’s President and Chief Innovation Officer. “The seamless integration built into Synergy Education Platform will make a significant contribution, as well, to the district’s efforts to improve data governance. We are pleased to welcome BASD aboard as an Edupoint partner.
About Edupoint Educational Systems
For over 35 years, the leadership of Edupoint Educational Systems has provided well-designed, technologically advanced student data management systems that empower K-12 stakeholders to improve student achievement. Synergy Education Platform by Edupoint is an industry-leading student data management ecosystem built to fit the way educators already work. Synergy is unique among K-12 student data management solutions in providing an array of role-based mobile apps designed to give all stakeholders access to the tools they need when and where they need them. More than 5.5 million students use Synergy in 22 states.
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