EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY LEADERS’ NEW PRODUCT ANNOUNCEMENT – RELIEVING THE PRESSURE ON THE EDUCATION SYSTEM

(Eiffel Corp — April 29, 2016) —

“As we know education is in crisis in South Africa, we believe that some of the pressure on the education system can be relieved by the use of technology in delivering content, and assisting educators by providing an easily manageable platform,” said Light from the Eiffel Corp head office in Sandton, Johannesburg.
“Eiffel Corp’s successful 18 year partnership with Blackboard, which has earned us the prestigious status as the only certified Blackboard Consulting Partner in Sub Saharan Africa, enables us to deliver effective, educationally focused software, implementation, application and strategic online solutions throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.
“Many of the top higher education institutions across the continent are clients and we have applied our comprehensive local knowledge and resource support to develop winning educational technology strategies that meet global best practice and standards.
With 34 500 eLearning enrolments at University of Pretoria (UP), the institution aknowledged the increasing demand for specific skills and expertise for the new “knowledge economy”. In response UP made the decision to develop a fully-integrated, blended learning environment and incorporates Blackboard technologies as a cornerstone of blended learning.
The plan was to use technology, multimedia and multiple modes of instruction to enhance learning, increase academic engagement and foster innovative instruction.
According to Dolf Jordaan, Deputy Director, E-Learning & Media Development at UP: “The UP Academic Plan 2025 acknowledges that the escalation of new technologies will have an increasing impact on teaching and learning and research within higher education. This puts pressure on UP to stay abreast of innovation in teaching and research while optimizing current technologies and investigating new technologies.”
Thanks to Blackboard having partnered with Moodlerooms, an enhanced version of the world’s most used learning management system (LMS), Moodle, Eiffel Corp is now able to offer this solution to the Sub-Saharan Africa market.”
Hosted in the cloud and matching the realities of a connected world, Moodlerooms provides the most reliable and scalable platform on which educators can build and removes all the worries about hardware, bandwidth, backups, upgrades or other IT headaches.

There are powerful enhancements like personalised learning, advanced reports and grading, plus improved course design, user-interfaces and branding potential to help educators increase recruitment, improve engagement and retention – and secure better outcomes, whether in the corporate, education, government or non-profit sectors.
In research conducted in the UK by Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) in 2014, Blackboard Learn is the most used enterprise or institutional virtual learning environment (VLE), followed by Moodle, and both platforms have increased in usage as enterprise solutions since the 2012 Survey.
“Our other new product Grovo, is reinventing learning for the 21st century,” added Light.
This short engagement skills development tool uses 60-second on-demand learning videos to deliver content in a fun and engaging way.
“The younger generation are so accustomed to receiving information in small bite-size chunks and this is the heart of Grovo’s microlearning system where learners receive short instructional videos and small, focused chunks of content—a proven way to engage 21st century brains.”
By populating learning platforms with quality and purpose-designed video content, teaching resources should engage modern students and they should mirror the patterns of knowledge acquisition, retention and reflection that modern technologies enable.
Eiffel Corp also supplies the following specialist education technology products and platforms to education institutions in Sub-Saharan African:
Blackboard, Staffroom, Turnitin, Academia ERP and iThenticate.

Sources:
http://images.email.blackboard.com/Web/BlackboardInc/%7B17a6e305-9548-4f57-8bcb-f623b424ee44%7D_INTL_2015_UniversityofGroningen_CaseStudy_WEB_11032015.pdf
http://images.email.blackboard.com/Web/BlackboardInc/%7B4dedc2d3-416c-4c64-ae75-16e5bc8217e9%7D_UofPretoria_CS_NB.pdf
http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/~/media/groups/dsdg/Tel%202014%20Final%2018%20August.ashx%E2%80%99
https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/library/articles-and-essays/the-teaching-forum/how-technology-enhances-teaching-and-learning/