2018 was a big year for Echo360.

Working together with more than 1,200 schools, we’ve enhanced distance learning and on-campus video learning programs for millions of students around the world. With more than 51 million measured student interactions and 20 million hours of faculty-recorded learning content viewed in 2018, we have been busy delivering on our promise to create, capture and extend great learning moments, wherever they occur.

This is great news for our company, and we were thrilled to see a 40 percent year-over-year sales growth in Q4. But Echo360’s unprecedented growth in 2018 is about more than our success as a company. It reflects a growing demand for active and accessible video learning tools that can help students improve collaboration with both their peers and faculty. Most importantly, it shows the commitment of our customers – colleges and universities of every size and type from across the world – to creating a more engaging, impactful learning experience for students. Everything we accomplished in 2018 would not have been possible without their partnership.

New Product Features

We take great pride in the dedicated and knowledgeable support we provide to our customers and our ability to incorporate their feedback into the design of our platform. In 2018, we’ve delivered several transformative features, designed to better meet the unique needs of our customers in higher education.

Our new Campus Video Management solution enables faculty and students to easily create, share and manage high-quality video on any device and through the LMS, so that in addition to managing all video on campus, the solution promotes smarter use of video for student learning and success. Meanwhile, our groundbreaking video capture software, Echo360 Universal Capture, — the first of its kind — helps institutions cut training and support costs by allowing for a single, unified experience across PC, Mac and Web recording devices.

Additionally, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services and built on Amazon Transcribe, Echo360 now offers the highest quality and most innovative automatic transcription service available in higher education to make video more accessible and engaging and provide a pathway to affordable closed captioning. Our unique transcript window provides a multimodal learning experience so students can read along with spoken content, search and navigate directly from the transcript to key points in the video or learning object, paste key elements of the transcript directly into a personal study guide and focus more on instruction rather than rote note-taking.

Improving the Learning Experience

Those new features — combined with Echo 360’s well-established role as a comprehensive video platform provider — are leading to increased engagement among students and reductions in failure rates across our partner institutions. The platform’s analytics enable educators to identify at-risk students earlier in the semester, as well as pinpoint moments in lecture material that students find most confusing. In one course at the University of Toledo, for example, failure rates decreased from 28 percent to 4 percent. And instructors at the University of Mississippi and University of Massachusetts Boston used the platform’s active learning tools to engage students, despite large class sizes, and improve their outcomes.

Moving Forward

In 2019, we will build on these successes. In particular, we plan on exploring new ways that our unique application of Amazon Transcribe can make learning more accessible and personalized, increasing equity in the classroom and ensuring that all students have access to active learning opportunities. By providing a scalable transcription solution, we can dramatically increase the amount of transcribed video content and unlock more efficient search and reference features. We will also enhance our integration with the LMS with better video assignments and extend our lead in analytics by providing new ways to see how students engage with video throughout their learning process. And, as part of our commitment to accessibility, we will continue to ensure that all new features conform to the WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines for accessibility.

Our success in 2018 demonstrates that mobile devices and laptops are no longer considered to be impediments to, or distractions from, learning. As these devices become ubiquitous on college and university campus and research continues to show the benefits of the video and active learning they enable, they are increasingly viewed as necessary tools for student success. In the year ahead, Echo360 is poised to continue embracing and pioneering innovations that help institutions meet the learning needs of today’s students — while redefining what both students and instructors can expect from learning technology.

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