Name: Transforming Learning with EchoInk for Higher Education
Uploaded: 2025-08-13T17:46:32.029Z
Duration: 30 min 8 s
Description: Transforming Learning with EchoInk for Higher Education

Transcript for "Transforming Learning with EchoInk for Higher Education": Hey, guys. We're gonna get started in just a few minutes. I'm gonna wait just a little bit to get everybody, in the room that is waiting in the lobby and just make sure we're all set and ready here in a few minutes. So just hang tight. We'll get started in just a few. Alright. I have the green light to go ahead and get started. So welcome, everybody. Super excited to jump into today's seminar and give you a little bit of a taste of Echo360 Echo Inc product. Just wanna introduce myself. My name is Blake Hedlund. I'm the global director of sales enablement and training here at Echo360. So I wanna thank you for your time today. We'll be spending about twenty to twenty five minutes to learn about how Echo Inc works and then take the last five minutes for your questions. So, if you do have questions, feel free to throw those into the chat, and then at the end, we'll address them all within the, last few minutes that we have. So that all being said, let's just kick off. In higher education, every role, whether it's faculty, food service, maintenance, or administrative staff, plays a vital part in the student experience. But here's the challenge. 87% of institutions say they struggle to keep operational content up to date and accessible, and nearly 80% of staff report that inconsistent training materials make it harder to do their jobs effectively. So unfortunately, now new staff end up spending about 25% of their first month just literally figuring out where to find information that they need. And almost half of universities admit that their SOPs are scattered across multiple platforms in multiple formats. As you can probably expect, there might be printed materials. There might be administrative documents that are underneath the firewall or underneath different types of file formats, like PDFs or PowerPoint presentations, just making it really difficult for the average person to just find what they need and understand what rules they need to follow. So now imagine if there's one single source of truth for all your university's policies, SOPs, operational guides, onboarding materials, all accessible on any device, in any location, and it's updated instantly. That's the power of Echo360 Inc. It ensures that the moment somebody joins your campus community, they have the knowledge, workflows, and resources to be productive, confident, and aligned with your mission, without spending weeks tracking down the right document or wondering if they have the most current version. So let's meet Marcus. He's a new instructor at a university. He's not only burdened with learning how to teach the many courses his students are starting in the fall, but also getting up to speed with the policies, the software, the procedures, and the technology the university provides to him. So Marcus pulls up his knowledge library powered by Echo360 Inc. And there, Jessica, one of his many authors or people that are subject matter experts, have deployed an ink doc on the university process with embedded training videos, annotated images, and key pieces of technology that he needs to learn, all in a lab and document that Marcus can highlight and take notes. He can go through checklists as he's physically there with a tablet or give feedback to the authoring team while he's back on his laptop. And over time, the content evolves. It's not only authored by one person, but as many subject matter experts as they need, And that really democratizes the authoring experience to help Marcus not only have all that information at his fingertips, but also have the confidence that the information that he's looking at is always up to date and always ready for that next semester. So as we talk about the Echo360 system, the world's first learning transformational platform, we have many different aspects to help universities. We have Echo360 video, which allows instructors to record their lectures and have that lecture be not only accessible to the students, but also summarized and aligned with the LMS so that they can always go back in and refer to lectures or notes within those lectures or even interact with other, students in that area of the video so that instructors can actually collaborate back and forth between them in that virtuous cycle of learning. We've got Echo360 engage. So when the instructor is up in front of the class and wants to create a poll session for everybody to engage with and answer questions or icebreakers, we can have Echo360 engage be a part of that experience for all those students. We can have Echo360 inc document all of this content, which we'll talk about today. And then we've got Echo360 exam, which allows any instructor to facilitate high stakes, real world, secure exams and be certified with a summative type exam. Now, keep in mind, there's exam or quizzing in all of these products, but echo exam takes it a step further, where we can do lockdown browsing and all the accessibility options that you may need for those finals exams out there. So today, we're gonna focus on Echo360 Inc, but it's all encompassed, like I said, in that virtuous cycle of learning. And when the within that virtuous cycle, we have things like pathways and checklists to keep people on track. So let's focus today on Echo360 Inc, where we author, curate, personalize, and distribute interactive content, deploying curricula optimized in mobile for that flow of learning wherever that learner might be. So let's dive into the three main personas that we have for today's demo. We first have Jessica, our learning content admin, who's helping manage the operational content and information the university needs to keep everybody up to speed. Marcus is our new team member instructor who's learning on the job, and he's gonna be walking through that content from the learning perspective. And then we've got Mandy, who's a new cook learning how to make delicious food in the kitchen that's gonna be experiencing that content on a tablet or a mobile device. She can do those operational procedures as she's looking at that content. So without further ado, let's dive into the demo. Marcus, our instructor, is gonna refer to all the content that he's got in his library here, and some of that might be something he might immediately need to see or later on as he's going through his training material. So for today, let's say he organically needs to navigate into the faculty guide to review some information. So he clicks on the faculty guide, and as you can see here, we've got our table of contents to the left and our content here in the middle for this particular document. Now keep in mind, California State University Lafayette is not an existing university. I just made it up so we could do this demo. Now the classroom and instructional procedures page, for example, we can go through an introduction to what the classroom should look like, how to start the class. We can have links to, like, the setup guide or other areas and helpful tips, watch videos on how the learning management system works or how we can set up Echo360 video or Echo360 exam, for each of the different classes that we may have. If I see something really important, I can highlight it and make my own notes. So if, for in this case, Marcus thinks this is really important to ask, Jessica about next time we meet. I'll save that in my own little personal notebook. And so that notebook lives with me in my profile regardless of the device that I am accessing this content in. And I can access these notes later. I can always refer to those as I see it. The other thing that's also cool is I can set up different pop tips or other interactive materials in the content to help me learn as I go through different parts of the software. So let's say I finish this particular document and I get back out into the main library area, and now I wanna prescribe a journey for myself. So as Marcus is first week in the university, he might go up to the training tab and see a more prescriptive approach to the content that he's got available. For example, he's got his new faculty training curriculum that he can jump into. He's even got individual courses he might have been assigned. So let's jump into the faculty curriculum. And similar to what you saw in the library, now all that content is set up in a sequential manner that I can step by step follow with every single step being tracked so that I know that I've completed it and move on to the next step. So the same information you saw earlier, now I can mark complete and move forward with just like I had earlier, but in a much easier way to consume that I can decide, okay, I've gotta pick up where I left off tomorrow on some of this content depending on when I decide to finish. So this course step information, like I said, can be set up in a certain page or an entire chapter if I like to have the learner walk through. Now maybe I might have operational steps in between some of this content. For example, I've gone through that instructional procedures overview page that we saw earlier. So I'll just kinda refer to that page for a second and walk through that just like you saw earlier, same information, same content, even the same notes that I had made. And then as I get to the bottom and I mark it complete and I get to the next step, I might have something that I physically have to do. Hey. Go log in to the Echo360 and set up your echo account. And I can do that by clicking on the link and going into, you know, that login and set up my account. Once I've set up my account, I'll come back and mark that complete. Now as I go through any of this content or information, you can see that it's step by step tracking each of those different progress points. So if I go back to training and I look, I can see my overall progress and my specific progress within each of those different steps. So Marcus has all this content assigned to him very easily, and he can step through it just like he would, on his computer or tablet anytime that he needs. If he goes back into the system later, he's got the home section to pick up on the courses he left off. We can also do a featured content update to allow everybody to be notified of any updates that are happening within a guidebook or other material that might be new or interesting for me to have announced. So Marcus can go into the announcement, look at some of the information that's being portrayed for this announcement, and then mark it as red, and go back to the home area. So this is a very simple, easy to use, approachable interface for Marcus to see all the content that he literally has available at his fingertips. If he has a question later about, you know, how to create an expense report, you can just go into the search and just start typing. And as he gets to that result, it's gonna go directly to that page of that content to answer his question. So creating an expense report is just as easy as clicking on that and getting to the page that explains that process. Now a new feature that we've added, which is really exciting, is the ability for Marcus to maybe perhaps change his language preference. So if Marcus happens to be not a first English speaker and maybe a German speaker, he could say, oh, let's use German as my preferred language. It's gonna automatically translate all the content for me as well. So if I went back into that faculty guide or that, expense report guide, let's go back to the expense report for a minute, we'll actually see that all converted into German. So Marcus has this wonderful opportunity to see any of the content in his native language instantly with just a click of a button. Alright. So that's a look at the reading interface that Marcus or somebody from that, learning would consume. Let me just switch it back to English before I forget. But now let's look at Jessica, our author. So Jessica allows her to update this content instantly. For example, Jessica has decided that maybe under the academic policies page, which hasn't really been completed, she needs to go in and fill some of this content in. So she can select any of the pages that are in here and start making changes as she needs it. Right? So getting to know your staff. And so as she makes changes and maybe removes things or adds things into here, that'll be tracked from her profile. So if anybody comes in and wants to pick up where she left off or adjust some of that content, she'll know or have available a record of all the changes that are in there from her page activity. So let's make that save. As you can see, the publish button goes from green to white because there's a new version now. And under page activity, Jessica has a new version. So if I go to compare versions, I can see the changes that I've made from the older version to the newer version, and I could restore that version if I had to. Mark comes in tomorrow or somebody else in the team wants to know what Jessica's been up to. Maybe Jessica wants to tag in somebody else in the system so she can go in and highlight content and add comments and then have that be attributed to other users. So maybe Jessica wants to tag me into the system and say, hey, Blake. Can you update this area? She can then assign that to me, send it over to me, and then I'll be able to make that change and reply back and put it into a fixed status at some point. So super easy for Jessica to be on the same page with all of her colleagues when she's updating the content. She can even add new team members in with different permissions. For example, somebody wants to be added in that's only a commenter and wouldn't have the publishing rights or somebody who only has commenting rights. We can even change the the audience that's being seen for that content. So right now, only internal employees or internal people from the university gets to see this content. We could say everyone could see it and it automatically changes our group. We can even set up custom rules so that maybe only certain people from a certain job title, only janitors, or only managers get to see this content. So really easy for us to adjust this on the fly, so that we can see our real time audience there. For now, we'll just keep it on everyone, but that's really easy for us to adjust in our document audience area. And, of course, since we've made some changes, we wanna publish those. So we'll go up to the top and hit publish, and that change goes across to the entire team. Alright. So that's a quick look at Jessica's authoring experience. Now let's take a look at Mandy, our cookout in the cafeteria. And so Mandy can jump into her content area and see some of the food service information she might need as she's walking through maybe a particular procedure like making a chicken sandwich. So she's got this chicken sandwich guide, for example, that she's gonna take a a look at. Nice thing about this is that it is mobile optimized, so super easy to access this content from any device, whether it's my phone or a tablet or even through native Siri or Okay Google capabilities. So depending on, you know, which device that I have, if I have the app installed, I could use the voice commands there. Hey, Siri. Search Echo360 Inc. How to filet a chicken sandwich. Here's my first result there, how to filet a chicken, and it takes me right to the fileting chicken content. A lot of times, our customers will be in a situation where they'll need to find content very quickly, So having that accessibility for a voice search to get to content as I'm walking through it, if I happen to be on the floor or in the area where I need to to access this mobile, all this content is indexed. So as soon as I publish it, the search already knows what's in there. Another thing that's common for a lot of our customers is to tag content and put it into a QR code. So for example, if I had that food service guide and I wanted to allow somebody to get to that food service guide from a QR code in the in the kitchen, every document's got its own little deep link URL so I could grab the overview page or even the get cooking page. Let's grab get cooking for now, and we'll copy that, And we'll grab our QR code generator. So I'll just put that web address in a QR code and create that. So now that I've got my QR code, I'll go back into my iPad. So I'll go into my camera here, and I'll scan it. And now it takes me directly to that page that I need to see on how to do the get cooking assembly process for that chicken sandwich. So Mandy has all the content that she needs at her fingertips, walking through that on her iPad while she's in the kitchen. So super easy for anybody that's a frontline worker to have all this information and available to them, at a moment's notice. And in this case, always up to date because the authoring team can go in here and add in different seasonal items or other procedures that they may need to have. So that is a quick look at Echo360. Super excited that you guys took a few minutes to to take a look at the product today. And we're gonna go ahead and stop the screen share here and take a few minutes to take some questions. Alright. We got our camera back up here. So we'll just take a a quick look at some of the questions that were coming into the chat here. So first question, how long does it take to typically create content in Echo360, and how is it set up with our branding? So that's a great question. As you saw earlier, there's just, like, branding that we had set up in a few of the demo assets that were incorporated into our content library that we had for for this demo. But, ultimately, we actually have a branding specialist as well as a content designer assigned to every customer that actually builds you a template. And when you're building new content, you're applying that template directly into the project as you build it. And that's gonna have your fonts, your colors, your logos, everything that you would need to make your content look beautiful and have it rebrandable every time you create new content. So, ultimately, if you've created that content in the past and you wanna recreate it, you can always save that content as a template and reuse that brain, or you can create separate templates for different purposes that maybe are used by different departments. So we work a lot with customers on that branding and just making sure that that looks perfectly as we apply that to your organization and have that set up for all your authors to create with. Now as you're selecting content in the platform, you're gonna be selecting brands and colors that you'll have approved just for the template. You won't have a thousand colors to choose from. You won't have 15 different logos. You're gonna have just the things that your company, or in this case, your university, has approved within that template. So that way, it's easier for the authors to not go off brand or not use colors or fonts that aren't approved. So in terms of creating that content, we like to say that it's pretty much anybody that's got Microsoft Word knowledge can go in author content, and that sort of democratizes the authoring environment for subject matter experts or other people at your university that have the knowledge that need to document it or maybe even convert it from other formats into the platform. So next question is, what integration options do you have if you, if we want this content to live in our LMS as well? And that's a great question. You actually can take this content into your LMS, whether it's Moodle or Canvas or one of the different, kind of higher ed, LMSs out there. There is a way to surface those deep links into the LMS and make it accessible in there as well. We can also integrate with the single sign on platform that they're you're already using. So that way, when they go to sign on, it's already using the sign on SAML, address that that user has been logged into. That way, they don't have to remember a new password when they go into the content. Can your content be public to students? So, yes, you can actually make content public. We have had a few customers do that where they've made content available to their customers or their student base, someplace where you might wanna have a public link for content, so that is possible. Can learning courses be automatically assigned? Yes. Yes. So if you have a course and you want that course to auto assign, you can just basically create a rule that says if the course is set up with this job title or this area, ultimately, if that user gets created through an integration. So if we do, like, an integration with a HR system, like ADP or Workday or some HRIS, and that person gets created, what we'll do is we'll say, if they're created and they have maybe this job title, they'll get this course or a number of different courses assigned to them. So it's called an auto assignment rule. And I didn't really get a chance to show that in the demo, but it is possible to do that. Can authors upload or import content from other formats? Yes. So there is a a way to upload any content that you've built in Microsoft Word. We also have different other options depending on if it's in PowerPoint or a PDF file. So we do work with customers on that. Sometimes it's a bit, subjective with the content because that content might be produced in a different format with different look that that needs to be recreated in in link doc format that makes more sense for the platform. And so we do have a content strategist working with customers initially on our implementation process to sort of train you up on how to properly import content, or in this case, if we are gonna have a project, we will import a lot of that content for you. So, definitely, we work with customers a lot on that. Customer of ours, H and R Block, they actually imported about 13,000 pages of tax content into the system, so it is possible to get massive amounts of content in there if need be. Okay. We just have time for about one more question. So let me see if I can find maybe the one. Can you access the content on phones without the app? Yes. We can. It's basically just gonna use whatever browser that your phone or your tablet is defaulted to. So if you go to scan the QR code, for example, like I showed earlier, and you happen to not have the app installed, no problem. It's just gonna go to the default browser, that you have, like Chrome or Safari, and then that will pop open with a login prompt. So it just kinda bypasses the login if you've already got the app installed and you've already kind of logged in and set up your account. But in this case, if you haven't, you'll just log in through the SSO or whatever means you might already have, to get to that content right from there in the browser. And it looks the same, acts the same, just some basic benefits that you'll get when you do have the app installed, like push notifications or Siri enablement so you can do that kind of hand hands researching that we saw earlier. Alright. So, unfortunately, we are out of time, and I did wanna give everybody, a few minutes to, to kinda wrap up here and get to their next meeting. So I do appreciate everybody jumping in and taking a look at the Echo Inc. Platform today. We're certainly, excited that you guys, took the chance to take a look at it and kinda spend some time with us to to walk through some of the features and functionality, including, if you do have some follow-up questions, you can contact your CSM if you happen to be a customer of ours. If you're somebody who's interested in Echo360 for the first time, feel free to reach out to us, and we can schedule a demo and go into more depth on your idea of what you wanna use the platform for and how we can apply it to you. So once again, my name is Blake. I appreciate you guys taking some time with us today, and, I look forward to seeing you at the next demo cast. So thanks a robot, everybody. Appreciate you. Take care.