“Christmas Came Early” When Motlow State Community College Adopted YuJa’s Video Platform and LMS Accessibility Platform

Motlow State Community College has served southern Middle Tennessee since 1969, growing from a single campus in Moore County into a five-campus institution spanning an 11-county service area. With that kind of reach, the college needed tools that could scale across faculty, students, and locations without adding complexity. That search led Motlow State to YuJa.

“Making the decision to use YuJa’s products was fairly straightforward for us. It was a no-brainer,” said Dr. Terry Durham, Dean of Academic Technology at Motlow State Community College. The college ultimately adopted both the YuJa Lumina Video Platform and the YuJa Panorama LMS Accessibility Platform, pairing a more advanced video editing tool for faculty with a dedicated accessibility solution.

When Dawn Bethea joined Motlow State as its Learning Management Systems Analyst, the institution was piloting the YuJa Video Platform and the Panorama LMS Accessibility Platform. Right away, she saw the excitement about YuJa’s solutions. “There were a lot of plus points instructors were excited about. From the video standpoint, teachers can now edit videos, and they couldn’t with the previous platform. They can add quizzes to their videos to add interactivity,” she said. “Our communications and speech instructors, who rely on video in their classrooms, were especially excited to have more options.” In terms of accessibility, “faculty members can actually fix accessibility issues right there on their screen, and that was a downside with our previous vendor,” Durham said.

“The benefits that we gained and the price point, it was just a no-brainer,” Bethea added. “Bringing that to our administration made sense just so they could see the benefits outweighed what we were paying for the three different platforms.”

The push for accessibility statewide began around 2016. At that time, Durham said, Motlow State was manually performing accessibility checks for every piece of content using tools available, primarily accessibility checkers included in word processing tools and other disparate solutions available online.

In YuJa Panorama, courses can be copied from masters for adjuncts and other faculty. When instructors add their own learning materials, accessibility issues can be quickly identified and resolved. “There are things faculty members wouldn’t even think to add to documents, simply because it’s in the file properties,” Durham explained. “We can add titles, tag PDFs, fix color contrast and other common issues, and it’s very easy for instructors. Being able to take that 50,000-foot view and see what needs to be taken care of immediately—that’s very beneficial, especially with federal requirements mandating full accessibility by 2026.”

The primary driver for getting a centralized video platform, even before the pandemic, was Motlow State’s speech courses. Students are required to upload videos to the D2L Brightspace LMS, but often had trouble submitting their recordings. “Instructors were getting so many different devices and flavors of videos that it was creating a real headache for instructors,” Durham said. In addition to devices creating different file types, some students used YouTube to host their videos before uploading while others used Dropbox or another file-sharing platform. “It makes life a lot easier to have a standard go-to we can tell faculty members and students to use.”

Today, instructors and students use the YuJa Video Platform to upload, edit, store, and manage videos, as well as for auto-captioning. “Students can upload content right into YuJa from their phones, put it into discussion forums or assignments, and it seamlessly goes right in,” Bethea said. “And the editing capabilities are great. Instructors can record from their screen, phone, or another recorder, and edit to make it their own.”

When Motlow State’s language department decided to create a new film class, instructors were thrilled with YuJa’s capabilities. “YuJa came at the perfect time. Instructors were able to get the videos and information they needed and to use a lot of videos that we probably wouldn’t have been able to with our other platform,” Bethea said. “The professors have been raving about YuJa because they were able to bring something to life that they wouldn’t have been able to build without access to YuJa.”

The class is set to launch in January 2025, and the YuJa Video Platform’s robust video handling and editing features, from easy uploading to in-platform editing, will continue to give instructors the tools they need to create an innovative learning experience.

YuJa Panorama has proven to be an invaluable training tool, particularly in raising awareness about accessibility. “When we turned on Panorama, faculty who believed their courses were fully accessible started identifying new issues,” said Dr. Durham. “It’s much more rigorous about details like color contrast—where faculty might have used red, orange, or fuchsia without realizing the impact before.” This increased awareness has fostered a culture of continuous improvement in creating more accessible content, he added.”

Looking ahead, Motlow State plans to expand its use of YuJa’s tools. The academic technology department is preparing to use the YuJa Video Platform for hosting D2L tutorials, and the external affairs department is exploring hosting public-facing content using YuJa Enterprise VideoTube.