San Francisco, Dec. 19, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Versal, an award-winning interactive course creation and publishing platform, today released the first open beta of the new Versal for Teams, a turnkey solution for organizations to manage the creation and publishing of online courses in a group setting.
Versal for Teams features all of the power of the Versal interactive course creator platform and adds a critical layer of administrative and learner-oriented features. Notably, Versal for Teams offers a convenient dashboard for managing author activity and access, course progress and settings, and learner success tracking.
Today, most organizations are limited to creating educational and training courses via videos, slide decks and Flash demos. Individual teams or course authors may use different tools - often whatever is handy. Long lead-times from conception to course delivery can result when internal software developers have to custom-code new courses and exercises. And managing all of these various efforts is a challenge for companies.
Plus, while locally-hosted or SaaS LMS and HR software systems may offer student and teacher management, they rarely include the ability to create a complete course experience. In those limited cases, courses typically consist of a series of standalone documents and videos taken in a pre-determined sequential order. These solutions may cost upwards of six-figures a year.
Versal's SaaS course authoring platform eliminates the need for locally-hosted software and costly maintenance fees. It includes everything an instructor needs to create a single integrated online course for learners, including a canvas for developing content and learning gadgets for interactive instruction.
"The importance of Versal for Teams was evident within weeks after we launched the company in July," said Versal founder and CEO, Gregor Freund. "We instantly started hearing feedback from companies and universities that they loved the ability to create and publish courses, but needed tools to manage everything internally. This is only our first step in building out a platform that is flexible for anyone - individual instructors and organizations alike."
Versal worked with three different types of organizations in private beta: Typesafe, provider of the world's first Reactive platform and the company behind Play Framework, Akka and Scala; Neo Technology, makers of the world's leading graph database Neo4j; and ITMO University, Russia's foremost information and optical technology school.
"We help developers build Reactive applications, and our technologies are cutting-edge," said Sushila Sahay, VP of Customer Operations at Typesafe. "It's imperative that we take the time to create educational materials for developers to get them up and running quickly. Programming is interactive, so it's great to have an alternative to video presentations. Versal gave us the ability to create a fantastic course, and the tools to manage it in-house. I recommend it for anyone looking to create education materials."
"We needed a way to teach our users how to get the most out of our product, and Versal for Teams was the perfect solution," said Adam Frankl, VP of Marketing and Training at Neo Technology. "Helping developers get up to speed on graph databases quickly is essential to our business. With Versal, we were able to create an interactive online course from our existing training classes, and the new administrative features gave us the tools to track adoption and generate qualified leads. Having such an effective teaching tool at our disposal is immeasurably valuable to both our users and to us. There's nothing else like it."
Versal for Teams features and pricing:
Course Creation and Publishing: Versal is a single place to create interactive online courses - no coding required. Authors may add text, video, quizzes, charts, diagrams and other customizable interactive simulations directly into a course using Versal gadgets. Organizations may publish and share courses directly with learners, or embed a course within a website or blog.
Author Management: A designated admin may offer select members of a team the ability to create and publish interactive courses, assign administrative privileges, and more.
Course Management: Admins may monitor the progress of authors by reviewing courses in progress, publish courses to Versal or embed them in their own organization's website and control course access, plus track activity.
Learner Success Monitoring: From the dashboard, admins and authors may track a learner's course progress.
Professional Services: Versal also offers professional service upgrades for select tiers. These services include custom interactive gadget creation and professional video production.
Pricing: The base plan is free. For teams with more than three courses, 100 expected learners, or high-bandwidth courses, pricing will start at $250/month. For early beta testers who sign up before December 31st, the first month is free for all accounts.
Versal was recently named a CES Innovations 2014 Design and Engineering Award honoree and will offer demos at CES in the Eureka Park NEXT section at the Venetian, at the TransformingEDU conference and will also be available for private meetings. For more information or to schedule an appointment, please email versal@lymanpr.com.
For additional information, visit Versal.com, or Facebook or Twitter.
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Allison Wagda
