Product Updates

April 6, 2022
Challenging Advanced Students With Differentiated instruction
“Differentiation has become a ubiquitous term and a much discussed concept in education. Educators everywhere realize that students have diverse needs, and there has been a push to ensure that teachers are using strategies and supports to meet the needs of all students,” a report by Teachers Pay Teachers said. The same report found that more than 95% of educators view differentiated instruction as important to student achievement. Providing educational support to advanced learners not only engages students, but also more actively involves them in the learning process.
DIFFERENTIATING EDUCATION FOR HIGH-ACHIEVING LEARNERS
YuJa makes it easy for teachers to provide varied work to meet the needs of high-achieving students. Carol Tomlinson, an expert in the field of differentiated instruction, notes that “a chief objective of differentiated instruction is to take full advantage of every student’s ability to learn.” Differentiated instruction provides all students with learning opportunities they need, but can be especially helpful for advanced learners. Ideas to help challenge advanced students include:
- Offer more challenging work to students who already have the basic competencies. Students can work independently or in groups.
- Offer a variety of assignment options. For instance, students could be offered the option of a PowerPoint presentation, an essay, a poster, or a video project.
- Break up classroom projects into different portions to allow students to focus on their strengths. Assign high achieving groups research tasks to increase their interest level.
Some of the top strategies for differentiation, according to the TpT report, include individual/small group instruction, leveled activities, scaffolded lessons, formative assessments, offering multiple learning styles, flexible timing, options to show learning and providing student choice.
BUILDING SKILLS FOR HIGH ACHIEVERS
YuJa enables students to engage and interact to build new skills and maximize the educational experience. Some high-achieving students, while successful academically, may struggle with social engagement or have other challenges.
- Real-time discussions enable in-depth conversation about class topics, enabling students who may be less likely to speak up in class to engage online.
- Auto Captioning offers a readable and searchable transcript, facilitating learning for students who do best with visual, rather than auditory learning.
- Students who feel anxious in large group settings may find video presentations less stressful than in-person presentations.
August 6, 2021
Creating an Accessible Higher-Ed Video Library that Exceeds Section 508 Requirements
With regard to video content, accessibility issues are predominantly focused on support for those with visual and auditory impairments. Captioning and description technologies can make video learning more available for students with visual or hearing impairments.

YuJa Video Platform Facilitates Captioning for Accessibility
For learners who are deaf or hard of hearing, closed captioning technology makes video learning more accessible. In addition, closed captioning may be helpful for students with auditory processing disorders and English language learners. There are several options available for closed captioning within YuJa’s Video Platform. Auto-Captioning: This technology provides a computer-generated caption file. Auto-captioning is highly effective, but is less likely to accurately capture accurate or technical terminology. Auto-caption files can be downloaded and edited for accuracy, which is an effective way to maximize caption accuracy while limiting costs. Human captioning: This type of service offers quality captioning to support students with disabilities. It’s performed by humans, which limits errors, but it is a costlier and more time consuming option. The YuJa Enterprise Video Platform integrates with third-party human captioning services for both automated and manual workflows, with ADA-compliant captioning solutions. To enhance accuracy of captioning, it’s important to have quality recordings:
- When recording video content, choose a good-quality USB microphone.
- Test your microphone and choose the best distance and volume for recording.
- Speak clearly and pace your speech appropriately. Pause for punctuation. This can help improve the quality and accuracy of captioning, especially if you’re relying upon auto-captioning.
Audio Descriptions Enhance Accessibility
Audio descriptions provide additional information for students who cannot clearly see on-screen content. These are not designed to fill in or explain content discussed out loud in the standard audio track, but rather to provide an additional description to support content referred to but not explained in the standard audio track. Description technology enables the addition of a second audio track to video content. This second audio track provides the ability to incorporate audio descriptions of on-screen content. Users can toggle between different tracks. Instructors or course creators also can:
- Create a short description track to provide a description of visual content, and tracks can be timed to fit in where needed in the video.
- Provide an alternate track incorporating both the standard audio content and the necessary descriptions using the same audio description upload options.
Screen Readers and Other Accessibility Options
Modern technology has maximized accessibility of online resources for students with disabilities. Many students rely upon additional technology to facilitate their use of online resources, including screen readers. Screen readers read screen content to students with visual impairments, or translate text into Braille. The ability to highlight text for use with a screen reader is helpful for students relying upon readers. For students with physical disabilities, the ability to use keyboard shortcuts can be a helpful way to navigate online content. Facilitating keyboard shortcuts through the use of an HTML5 media player is an effective way to increase accessibility. YuJa is constantly working to increase accessibility not just to meet compliance requirements, but to provide the best possible learning experience for students.
June 21, 2021
Instructional Chunking With YuJa’s Video Platform
Instructional Chunking at a Glance

Chunking in higher education is also commonly referred to as micro-lessons. When put into practice, the material is broken down into modules and then broken down once more into lessons, which are typically 5 to 10 minutes in length. These compact lessons are used as a strategy to break down complex information into more digestible tidbits, making it easier to learn and allowing the brain to process and retain the new information.

Because research has shown that students better learn and retain information that has been broken down through chunking, instructors have embraced the method in their course design. Given the rise of online learning, chunking is especially important, as content has to be presented both logically and progressively for students to excel.

Chunking With YuJa’s Enterprise Video Platform

Chunking can be used to benefit students at all levels of education. Research by experts at Nielsen Norman Group showed that people prefer content that is logically divided or chunked because the information appears less difficult and easier to understand.

YuJa’s Video Platform lends itself to many capabilities, but it’s designed to help make learning and instructing easier, including through chunking instructional material. One way to facilitate chunking is through a flipped classroom, which is a blended form of learning where instruction is done at home through video, and during scheduled class time teachers focus on allowing students to gain a deeper understanding of concepts through discussion, group activities and more detailed instruction. Flipped classrooms naturally lend themselves to take the form of chunking, because lessons are typically taught within a shorter time frame than what is seen in a traditional classroom setting.

Instructors can take the concept of chunking a step further in a flipped classroom by turning what normally would be a passive learning experience into an active or interactive one. Through YuJa’s Video Capture Instructors can:
- Create a video quiz with existing video content;
- Turn their media player into a collaboration space with time-linked, in-video commenting tools;
- Allow students to review, search and annotate video content.
Using Analytics to Inform Instructional Design

YuJa also allows its users the ability to see how effective videos are through the Video Analytics Suite, which provides instructors and course designers a deeper understanding of how their lessons are making an impact on students.

This additional access helps pinpoint areas of concern, and track participation and user adoption using near real-time reporting tools. Data can be filtered based on specific courses, video and users. Additionally, “hotspots,” or areas of confusion are highlighted, along with drop-off points, popular content and more. Administrators, teachers and faculty also can quickly perform data exports, including setting up automated report generation and publishing.

No matter your educational institution, YuJa’s products aim to simplify the workflow and make it easy for teachers to provide the best learning experience for students.
February 8, 2021
The Benefits of Captured Lectures and Lessons in Traditional Classrooms
Captured lectures are accessible both to students in real-time (live) and for future use (captures), enhancing flexibility for students, while also helping improve learning and increase course material understanding.

How Do Captured Lectures Benefit Students in Traditional Classrooms?

Traditional students can take advantage of lecture broadcasts to rewatch a difficult concept, catch up if they were unable to be in class, review their notes, and to prepare for tests. In fact, a 2019 study conducted by Computers & Education found that “students make significant use of lecture recordings, throughout the academic session, and place great value on recordings for note-taking, more in-depth understanding or clarification, and assessment preparation.”

Lecture Capture Can Help Meet the Needs of All Learners

Lecture broadcasts, complete with multimedia integration, can meet the needs of different types of learners, including visual and auditory.
According to the Visual Teaching Alliance:
- The brain processes visual information 60,000 faster than text.
- Visual aids in the classroom improve learning by up to 400 percent.
Recording lectures also is one way to improve learning experience for auditory learners, who can focus on listening closely and processing information during class and then listen to the recording later to take notes on the most important information. For students with special learning needs, lecture broadcasts can take the place of notes or low-quality in-class recordings, and improve a student’s ability to learn. Providing captions and audio can help students with hearing or visual impairments. Research has suggested that many students found access to lecture capture to be empowering because it enables them to take control of the learning process. Exploring lecture capture can enrich both online and in-person learning for students and offer faculty new ways to improve learning and retain students.
December 28, 2020
10 Online Video Platform Features You Didn’t Know Your Organization Needed

And while these features are paramount, there are hundreds of other elements that can move the needle significantly when properly deployed.

“When you deploy an Online Video Platform to an organization with 25,000 users, it is used in 25,000 different ways,” said Nannette Don, Director of Enterprise Sales at YuJa, Inc. “People tend to go in very different directions very quickly based on their own individual needs. The platform needs to be many things to many people.”

Oftentimes, organizations selecting a video platform aren’t sure what features will make a difference for their users.

We’ve narrowed down a list of 10 small, but powerful, features the YuJa Enterprise Video Platform offers that you may not have known you need.

Streamlined Single Sign-On (SSO) Process for Externally Embedded Content

When a user clicks on a secure video that requires authentication, a pop-up window will allow the user to enter their SSO credentials. The window will disappear once authentication has taken place. Though this may seem like a relatively small upgrade, it makes the sign-in process less cumbersome for users and improves their overall experience.

Ability to Share Video Quizzes Editing Capabilities With Other Users

We know that often, course design is a collaboration between an instructional designer, professor or instructor and other IT professionals within your organization, depending on the complexity. With the Video Platform, everyone involved in the process can quickly and easily move content back and forth, sharing access between users for simplified collaboration.

Video Quiz Gamification Capabilities to Create Advanced Tours

This feature allows Video Quiz creators to design a choose-your-own-adventure type video quiz. Additionally, a decision point question type provides the ability to customize the linear progression of a video-based quiz depending on the response to a proposed decision point. That sounds complicated, but the takeaway is that it enables an interactive user experience where video content can be sequenced in a non-linear fashion based on interactive input.

Deep Audit Logging of Everything With Subscription Management Capabilities

The Video Platform provides deeper audit logs of quiz events, from deleting to editing, publishing, quiz attempts and more. Additionally, with hundreds of thousands of audit log entries, the Video Platform offers a more robust notifications tab and better tracking of specific audit log events. Administrators also can create email subscriptions with requested notifications sent in real time to the user.

Support for Locked Student Video Submissions

When users create and submit video assignments within an organization’s LMS, content can be auto-locked to prevent changes after submission. When locked, content embedded using the Media Chooser with Deep-Linking Enabled cannot be modified, moved, or deleted.

Simple Workflows to Bulk Upload Media

Bulk media management provides an effective way to manage content, including publishing, sharing, and tagging, all in one toolset. The Video Platform provides the ability to upload batches of media, as well as folders of content using web-based drag and drop and local and network drive drop folders. The YuJa Cloud automates the process of converting, transcoding, and formatting the video files into easy-to-view formats accessible on a variety of devices. (SCREENSHOT)

Audio Level Amplification Tracking in Video Editor

Users can amplify audio tracks in situations where the original audio track is too low with integrated Audio Level tools within the Video Editor. This capability fully re-encodes and amplifies the audio track while guarding against over-amplification.

Mobile Applications Support Offline Downloading of Content

Users have the ability to download approved media for offline viewing (without WiFi or network connectivity). Whether users are downloading videos for studying on a plane or for viewing in an area with low or poor internet connection, they’ll be able to access videos any time from anywhere.

Prevent Accidental Data Loss with Deep “Undo” Capabilities

The YuJa Enterprise Video Platform recognizes that it is natural for users to make mistakes when using technology. As a result, we have extensively researched instances in which human error could arise and created “undo workflows” that allow users to correct their mistakes without having to expend time making corrections. Users can undo or replace slides, already published videos or other media and video edits.

“Replace Video” Feature Allows Re-Deployment of Videos Published in Multiple Locations

The Video Platform allows administrators to re-deploy an edited video or embed code published in several locations without the need to relink or republish content. Making edits post-publishing has never been quicker or easier.