YUDU Media Teams Up With Educators, Publishers To Enhance Academic Features
LONDON (April 3, 2013) – In response to valuable feedback from a variety of educators and publishing experts, online publishing pioneer YUDU Media today released several new and enhanced features on YUDU Education, a revolutionary technology tool that allows publishers to easily convert textbook content to digital form, as well as add rich media elements to accommodate the interactive focus of today’s teachers and students.
YUDU Education’s sophisticated, yet cost-effective, cloud publishing platform puts publishers back in the driver’s seat, allowing them to maintain their distribution channels and important educator relationships while providing users with maximum ease of access across multiple platforms, including tablets, smartphones, desktops and laptops. Publishers who recently signed up for the app include Educate.ie and Edco and Rhinegold Publishing.
According to YUDU CEO Richard Stephenson, educators are ultimately the key influencers in the world of education’s publishing process, especially when it involves how to best serve the needs of teachers and students.
“The new and enhanced features have been meticulously created by YUDU’s technology team in response to what they have discovered after spending valuable time with educators and publishers in the marketplace,” said YUDU CEO Richard Stephenson. “Together, we have collaborated to develop digital products that will engage schools, teachers and students. This kind of partnership is crucial in helping to make positive changes in the evolving world of educational technology.”
One of the publishing tool's most popular new features is called Freehand Highlighting. This allows students to highlight a page, change nibs and alternative colors on a particular page of their tablet. These edits and markings can then be translated and viewed on a desktop computer.
“This feature seamlessly synchronizes across all of a student’s devices, so they can view content on a smartphone, for example, and then pick up where they left off later on a tablet or PC,” he said. “YUDU Education recognizes today’s need to embrace multiple digital platforms.”
Another new feature allows both teachers and students to easily add notes through an improved user interface. In addition, YUDU Education has made its Desktop Page-Turning and Activation of Features easier to use, giving the option to activate via a mouse.
The educational publishing platform also added HTML overlays --- in Lightbox ---making all of the interactive content accessible via a feature on each page, “so, from a publisher’s perspective, they can feed us PDF content simply, yet still have interactivity on the page where it’s really useful,” Stephenson noted.
The educational publishing tool’s additional new features include: Amazon in-app purchasing, where textbooks that can be sold via publisher websites, are also now available via the Amazon store on Kindle devices (The app is still free to download, and users can purchase the books from within the app); and, a custom order of editions in the app option, so rather than placing books in the order that they are published, publishers can arrange them by theme within the app.
In addition to the new features, YUDU Education has enhanced some of its original features, including allowing users to: capture page clippings (text and images); conduct keyword searches; bookmark pages; and, use a pinch-and-zoom feature to optimize viewing on various devices. YUDU Education also delivers reader analytics, providing publishers with powerful strategic insights and enhancing their ability to remain responsive to emerging educator and student needs. Publishers can analyze data at the page, image or video level to determine how readers access information. They can also conduct opt-in surveys to gather additional insight.
“We are constantly in the polishing and refining process with all YUDU Education features,” Stephenson said. “Our mission is to differentiate ourselves from the technology companies that come into this field. We do this by sitting very closely with experts in the educational and publishing fields … our products are developed with these experts very much part of the overall team.”
About YUDU Media
YUDU is a digital publishing support service provider, offering the YUDU Cloud Publishing Platform, which enables digital publishing for iOS, Android, Windows and Web. YUDU is a trademark of YUDU Media Corp. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.