Accelerated by the COVD-19 pandemic, with lingering effects today, the number and diversity of digital learning tools has multiplied exponentially for educational, business and government organizations. These tools have been essential in ensuring that teaching, training, and learning outcomes can be achieved amidst greater demands for flexible and hybrid – on premise, online (synchronous and asynchronous) instructional and working environments. While their benefits are inarguable, the rapid adoption of disparate digital learning tools has created new challenges for key stakeholders. Instructors and trainers must learn, support and manage multiple tools and try to link them together to create and deliver cohesive course, training content and learner experiences. Whereaslearners including students and employees must become fluent with multiple tools with different user interfaces to access instructional content and complete assigned work. In fact, the influx of new learning technologies, sometimes hastily developed with usually a singular focus and limited interoperability, has created a universe of disparate options for instructors, administrators, and learners. Echo360 is solving these challenges by delivering a holistic, interrelated, and modular approach to creating, delivering, animating, and evaluating learning outcomes through its “Echosystem”. Echo360 also provides differentiated value and impact through a surgical focus and responsiveness to the needs of 3 key stakeholders in its Inspired Learning Trilogy: learners, instructors, and administrators. Through responsive, trusting relationships with the roles and “real people” in its Inspired Learning Trilogy – investing in annual research and innovation grants, advisory councils, product user groups, and campus interns – Echo360 is anticipating, meeting, and exceeding the needs of its stakeholders worldwide.
As the leading company trusted by some of the world’s most pedigreed educational institutions and biggest brands — from Lululemon and Nike to American Airlines, BMW, The Mayo Clinic, all branches of the U.S. Military, and U.S. federal agencies like the FBI and FEMA — Echco360 serves over two million instructors, trainers, and learners at more than 2,000 companies, educational, and government institutions in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific. “Our numbers are impressive but it’s the customers who count,” said Murad Velani, President and CEO, Echo360.“Our Inspired Learning solutions enable transformative experiences among people – instructors, students, trainers, employees. It’s the relationship between them, and the relationship between our customers and our team that drives us.”
The Echosystem: Delivering Personalized Learning
Built for the cloud, the Echosystem delivers solutions to instructors and learners wherever they are, on any device, to create, record, and consume content, give and receive feedback, and gain real-time insights along their inspired learning journey. The Echosystem is comprised of four key solution sets that can be subscribed to independently or in any combination. “We provide seamless integrations with leading platforms such as LMS (Learning Management Systems), Zoom, Teams and co-exist with existing content, communication and collaboration tools that customers may already have adopted. In addition, we provide deep analytics that help instructors, administrators and students to gain insights on the learner experience,” continued Velani.
The Echosystem provides a single portal for engaging content creation, robust analytics, and data visualization, which increases accountability and equitable outcomes. Instructors and trainers can easily take and manage session attendance, deliver quizzes and real-time polling, and engage and motivate learners in online or face-to-face courses to support flipped, blended and hybrid classroom and workplace approaches.
Two of the most widely utilized products of the Echosystem are EchoEngage and EchoVideo:
With EchoEngage, Echo360 delivers the most advanced features of audience engagement, content creation, classroom management, and analytics of the Echosystem, including:
- Single source hybrid learning: enabling instructors and trainers to engage with live and remote audiences, track attendance, and assign self-paced learning from a central hub.
- Multi-modal audience engagement: blending live sessions or self-paced assignments with interactive assessment and virtual learning spaces.
- Multi-level reporting: providing performance and engagement results at the individual, session/class/assignment, and course level.
- Integrated toolset: ensuring that our solution seamlessly plugs into the most popular LMS and HRIS platforms being used by educational, business and government organizations.
With EchoVideo, the company deliver the most advanced features of video creation, curation and publication with the most reliable and scalable platform which includes:
- Recording diversity and live streaming, with the purpose of capturing the learning experience in any synchronous or asynchronous context, supporting face-to-face, blended, hybrid and/or online learning.
- Content management, storage and editing, to ensure that media can be easily created, managed and shared.
- Superior playback, search and engagement tools, supporting Echo360’s ‘anytime, anywhere’ playback philosophy as well as ensuring that students have the necessary tools to take notes, have discussions, answer questions and provide feedback within the media environment.
- Centralized management and monitoring tools
- Learner analytics and dashboards, available both in the platform and via Echo360’s robust API.
- Integrations with VLEs, video conferencing and in-room audio-visual systems, which works with customers’ existing digital investments.
Case Study: Using EchoVideo to Transform Learning
The world’s most influential brands and institutions in higher education, corporations and government can attest to Echo360’s unique abilities and outstanding performance in transforming learning and training experiences. Case in point: When Macquarie University, sought to create a more equitable and engaging way for students to communicate knowledge, understanding and experiences, they turned to EchoVideo to transform the way students demonstrated comprehension and how instructors provided feedback.
“Through the simple act of creating a video, students learned how to project themselves,” said Dr. PanosVlachopoulos, Associate Dean for Quality and Standards at the University. “They learned how to become storytellers and how to brand themselves. They developed skills that will go far beyond their academic discipline.”
In addition to students to creating media content for assessments, Dr. Vlachopoulos used video to share assessment feedback with students, and cited that students responded more readily to this feedback as they saw and heard his personality through video.
Additional benefits and improvements experienced by instructors and students using EchoVideo for assignments and assessments included:
- Increased collaboration among students who were more willing to share videos with peers in ways they did not with written assessments.
- Video assignments being more resilient to plagiarism and academic misconduct than a more traditional written assessment.
- Instructors using EchoVideo platform reported it to be an effective platform to store and manage student assessments.
The Echo360 Formula and Full Range Learning Engagement Solutions
Echo360’s vision of engaged and equitable learning for everyone, anywhere,is expressed today in its “e3” formula for Inspired Learning:
Engagement
Enabling the development and delivery of content in compelling, captivating ways with interactive polling and audience response and seamless integrations with popular applications like PowerPoint, Teams, and Zoom.
Equity
Providing fair and equitable access to all, meeting/exceeding the highest ADA and WCAG standards for accessibility.
Evidence
Delivering experiences that have meaningful, measurable outcomes empirically measured through dashboards and real-time reporting.
Fueled by organic development and M&A activity, the company’s mission and ability to deliver on its “e3” formula through a full range of learning engagement solutions under “one roof” is unique to Echo360. Assembling this powerful portfolio of solutions and platforms represents the latest chapter of innovation, as no other e-learning provider delivers the range of inspired learning solutions to so many leading and global educational, commercial, and government institutions as Echo360 does. “Inspired by our vision and shaped by over 20 years of experience delivering measurable impact for our customers, our “e3” formula for inspired learning fuels everything we do, for every individual and organization we do it for,” points Velani.
As a company, Echo360’s profitable growth has been and will continue to be fueled by momentum in market expansion and product innovation. Corporate growth across North America, EMEA, and APAC regions will be driven through continued proliferation of Echosystem products across existing and new customers, where end-to-end solutions are in high demand. “Our expanding network of channel partners across the globe, also equipped with the Echosystem’s deeper solution set, will unlock growth in untapped areas of EMEA and APAC. Upcoming product enhancements, SaaS EchoExam, and a revolutionary new SaaS polling solution from EchoEngage are on the horizon and accelerate our growth across all markets and geographies,” concludes Velani.
Company:
echo360
Management:
Murad Velani, President & CEO
Quote:
“Our numbers are impressive but it’s the customers who count. Our Inspired Learning solutions enable transformative experiences among people – instructors, students, trainers, employees. It’s the relationship between them, and the relationship between our customers and our team that drives us.”
