Today, we’re excited to share new innovations that support learner goals, educator efficiency, and skill-based learning within institutions. Learners, educators, and organizations can use these tools on Edcent to develop in-demand skills and scale learning programmes in a rapidly changing world.
Improving learner success and accessibility
Of the 900 hundred learners on Edcent, more than 40% are outside the Nigeria. To best serve our diverse audience, we’ve focused on tools and features that support an even more inclusive, learner-friendly experience:
REAL-TIME PERSONALIZATION – Whether a learner just joined or has been on Edcent for months, they’ll see real-time, personalized recommendations for Guided Projects, courses, Specializations, and degrees, helping them find content that fits their interests and goals. Many aspects of personalization have already launched, with more rolling out over the quarter.
SUBTITLE TRANSLATIONS – Learners can now choose their preferred language for more courses thanks to machine-generated translations, which created Spanish, French, Portuguese, and ArabicHausa subtitles for over 2,000 top courses.
ACCESSIBILITY SUPPORT – To ensure the learner experience across web, mobile, and Guided Projects is accessible to learners of all abilities, we’ve focused on support for screen readers and keyboard navigation, closed captions, visual affordances, and much more.
FORUM RECOMMENDATIONS – Driven by AI models, relevant forum thread recommendations will be visible on programming assignments, helping learners easily find the right guidance and support from the Edcent learner community. Launching later this year.
Creating scalable tools for educators
As more educators move online, they need to be able to author content efficiently and effectively, offer hands-on learning experiences, manage grades and program operations at scale, and monitor student or content performance at any time. With these wide-ranging educator needs in mind, we’ve introduced:
COURSE CONTENT UPLOAD – To upload courses in under one minute while adhering to Edcent’s pedagogical best practices, educators can design and build content directly in a new spreadsheet template from Edcent.
PROGRAM STAFF MANAGEMENT – This self-serve tool enables educators to efficiently manage staff permissions at a program level for their degree programs.
COURSE INSIGHTS DASHBOARD – This dashboard equips educators with more granular and actionable insights into learner behavior in a course — namely around assessments — including average attempts to pass a particular version of an assessment, number of learners who completed all assessments, and average scores.
MARKETING DASHBOARD – Educators can easily measure the impact of their marketing efforts on learner engagement in their courses, Specializations, and Professional Certificates through a self-serve marketing dashboard.
REVENUE DASHBOARD – This dashboard enables educators to track and analyze the financial performance of their content on Edcent over time, highlighting revenue by business line, product, and product type, with the option to download the data for offline analysis.
Supporting high-quality online and blended learning programs with Edcent for Campus
With universities and colleges creating more for-credit online learning programs, the stakes are higher when it comes to getting online learning right. We’re focused on building tools to support higher ed institutions in creating their own, customized online programs:
PLAGIARISM DETECTION – To further deter academic dishonesty, we enabled a similarity score checker with Turnitin for peer reviews in Edcent for Campus programs, which in its pilot led to a 50% decrease in plagiarized submissions.
FOR-CREDIT LEARNING – With the curriculum builder tool, university decision-makers can pick the right for-credit courses on Edcent for their students. Educators can then use the fixed schedules feature to align the selected online courses with their institution’s academic terms. Launching later this quarter.
PROGRESS MONITORING AND GRADEBOOK – Improvements to the admin feature will help faculty better identify struggling students in need of intervention — an especially critical tool in for-credit programs. Launching later this quarter.
Powering skill-based learning within organizations
According to the World Economic Forum, as in-demand skills continually shift, 94% of business leaders report that they expect employees to pick up new skills on the job. To address this trend, we created skills-focused tools:
SKILL DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM – With Academies, SkillSets, and the Skill Development Dashboard 3.0, organizations can drive digital literacy, upskill teams with critical skills, and reskill talent for in-demand jobs – all while tracking employee skill progress.
DIAGNOSTICS – Employees will be able to assess their proficiency in a SkillSet using diagnostics, then receive recommendations on what courses they should take to increase proficiency. Launching later this quarter.
Keeping up with the dynamic needs of learners, educators, and institutions requires constant product innovation. Whether it’s a new feature for an individual course or a revised authoring flow for MasterTrack Certificates or degree programs, we’re constantly developing tools that help us serve the global learner community and connect anyone, anywhere with high-quality online learning.