by:Jean-Marie Cognet on: December 20, 2024At the end of November, for the second year in a row, we were honoured to host a UbiThinkTank event that gathered our top International Customers at UbiCast HQ, in Paris.
This has been a very good opportunity to introduce our roadmap for the upcoming year, and have it challenged by some of our “power users”, who highlighted the main anticipated benefits and the pain points we overlooked.
Beyond the other traditional topics you could expect to discuss at such an event, I have identified 3 key takeaways that are definitely not limited to video platform solutions but that are relevant to all Edtech companies involved in pedagogy.
AI and I
Personally, I’m fed up with the “AI everywhere for everything” trend we experience these days. Of a hundred ideas or solutions, 5 are relevant and 95 seem totally pointless to me. There is a sort of urge to introduce AI in every solution on the market. But the real question is: does it make sense?
At UbiCast, we ran some tests and pilot projects but so far nothing convinced us. That’s why we had to debate about AI with our user group and identify what would be the best way to integrate it in our solutions.
- As for every product to be designed, when it comes to AI, we need to think about the user persona first. In our edtech world, is it the student? The teacher? The learning designer? The expectations, benefits and the user experience are totally different!
- It has to be 100% accurate if you aim at helping teachers save time. A vast majority of them won’t take the time to correct mistakes and hallucinations introduced by AI algorithms. And do you know an AI today that is 100% accurate? I don’t. During one of our tests, we tried to create an automatic chaptering on long videos thanks to AI. At first glance, it seemed really cool! However, we then tried to relaunch the operation on the same video 15 minutes later, and we got totally different results! How can you trust it? Anyway, Higher Education institutions just can’t rely on unreliable AI solutions if those tools are not moderated by teachers afterwards.
- People that are really engaged don’t need an integration, they can combine the best tools manually when it’s required. Learning designers and passionate instructors take the best out of specialised tools to augment the learning objects they create. If you only rely on your existing solution, you lose control over the AI tool that is running behind and thus the output’s quality.
From a UbiCast perspective, the most promising applications of AI we see now are summarised videos and chatbot. Wouldn’t it be brilliant to ask a chatbot if he could rephrase the last couple of minutes of the lecture you’re playing for instance? Happy to hear from you about these AI challenges, feel free to write to me about this!
Students’ ecosystem VS Institution’s platforms
If you try to boost learner’s engagement online, the platforms managed by the institution aren’t necessarily the best place for it. It’s probably not as strong as “distrust” but students don’t feel it’s their place. They will rather use their favourite third party platforms like WhatsApp to take and share their notes, Discord to chat with others, ChatGPT to… wait, what? Let’s not debate this :)
Each edtech solution has to consider who is likely to benefit from these tools, what is the value proposition and if it’s correctly positioned in the institution’s IT landscape.
Learning traces and the xAPI standard
For years now, we have been speaking about xAPI as the rising standard in the learning ecosystem, and particularly when it comes to learning traces. It is supposed to replace the SCORM standard for 15 years to improve learning analytics precisely.
However… so far, a very few Higher Education institutions have implemented a Learning Record Store (LRS) to store and mine the traces generated by students' activities within the LMS, edtech solutions, etc. Without the LRS, you can’t generate global and useful insights from your data. Each platform will certainly provide its own data, but it will stay siloed, keeping you away from the ultimate dream in the learning industry: Personalised Learning.
This being said, what could be a game changer about this? Learning Management Systems could attach a native LRS to their platform, edtech companies could bundle a generic one with their solutions?
We will definitely follow up on these topics in 2025, and I’m very happy to see that the group that met in Paris is staying connected and keep discussing on various topics 🙂
-2.png)
