Echo360: A leading SaaS EdTech platform trusted by millions worldwide

“Our Echosystem is a dynamic SaaS platform of innovative solutions that correspond to the relationship, environment, content, and assessment required.”

Echo360 is a leading SaaS interactive learning management, content, engagement, and assessment platform serving over two million learners and instructors at more than 1200 higher education institutions in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia Pacific. Designed for the cloud, the platform scale enables instructors and students from all over the world to produce, record, engage with, and consume content from anywhere, on any device, as well as to provide and receive feedback and acquire real-time insights during their inspired learning journeys.

Murad Velani, CEO of Echo360, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review on how the company is making an impact on and innovating in the learning and lives of people and organizations all over the world.

Trusted by Top Brands

Education standards are constantly evolving, and Echo360 is proud to help instructors, administrators, and students around the world achieve their aspirational learning goals. The Echo360 platform has been employed by a number of esteemed academic institutions and some of the most illustrious businesses in the world, including Lululemon, Nike, American Airlines, BMW, The Mayo Clinic, all branches of the U.S. Military, and federal organizations including the FBI and FEMA. Echo360 is the only EdTech provider that provides a wide range of inspired learning solutions to so many leading educational, commercial, and government institutions. Built for the cloud, instructors, trainers, and learners at the largest educational, commercial, and government institutions around the world use the capabilities of its ‘Echosystem’ from wherever they are, on any device, to create, record, engage, and consume content, give and receive feedback, and gain real-time insights along their inspired learning experience.

The Echosystem platform has four key products that can be subscribed to independently or in any combination. “We provide seamless integrations with leading platforms such as LMS (Learning Management Systems), Zoom, and Teams and co-exist with existing content, communication, and collaboration tools that customers may already have adopted.” “In addition, we provide deep analytics that help instructors, administrators, and students gain insights on the learner experience,” said Murad Velani.

The Echosystem: Bringing Learning to Life—Anywhere

Driven by the COVD-19 pandemic and its lingering effects today, the number and diversity of digital learning tools have multiplied exponentially for educational and business organizations. These tools have been essential in ensuring that teaching, training, and learning outcomes can be achieved amid greater demands for flexible instructional and working environments.

While their benefits are inarguable, the rapid adoption of disparate digital learning tools has created new challenges for key stakeholders, including:

• Instructors must learn and manage multiple tools and try to link them together to create and deliver cohesive course or training materials.
• Learners must become fluent with multiple tools with different user interfaces to access instructional content and complete assigned work.
• IT administrators must install, integrate, support, and maintain multiple tools from different vendors with varying levels of functionality and interoperability.

The influx of new learning technologies, sometimes hastily developed with a singular focus and limited interoperability, has created a universe of disparate options without any semblance of order, scalability, or operationalization for instructors, administrators, and learners.

Echo360 is solving for the above challenges by delivering an innovative, scalable, holistic, interrelated, yet independent approach to creating, delivering, animating, and evaluating learning outcomes through its “Echosystem”.

Echosystem is Echo360’s innovative SaaS platform of scalable solutions that correspond to the relationship, environment, content, and assessment required. The company offers access to the most flexible, easy-to-use learning engagement solutions around the world, enabling instructors and trainers to increase interaction and engagement across both synchronous (live) and asynchronous (self-paced) environments. The company’s personalized learning engagement layer provides a single portal for engaging content creation, robust analytics, and data visualization, which increases accountability and equitably impacts learning experiences. Instructors and trainers can easily take and manage session attendance, deliver quizzes and activate real-time polling, and engage and motivate students in online or face-to-face courses to support flipped, blended, and hybrid classroom and workplace approaches. Echo360 leverages various e-learning product platforms, such as EchoEngage, EchoVideo, EchoAuthor, and EchoExam.

Two of the most widely utilized platforms of the Echosystem by customers around the world are EchoEngage and EchoVideo:

EchoEngage

With EchoEngage, Echo360 delivers the industry’s most advanced features for audience engagement, content creation, classroom management, and analytics, including:

• Single-source hybrid learning: enabling instructors and trainers to engage with live and remote audiences, track attendance, and assign self-paced learning from a central hub.
• Multi-modal audience engagement: blending live sessions or self-paced assignments with interactive assessment and virtual learning spaces
• Multi-level reporting: providing performance and engagement results at the individual, session, class, assignment, and course levels
• Integrated toolset: EchoEngage seamlessly plugs into the most popular LMS and HRIS platforms being used by educational, business, and government organizations.

EchoVideo

EchoVideo, also an industry-leading SaaS platform, provides the most advanced features of video creation, curation, and publication on the most reliable and scalable platform, which include:

• Recording diversity and live streaming, with the purpose of capturing the learning experience in any synchronous or asynchronous context, supporting face-to-face, blended, hybrid, and/or online learning.
• Content management, storage, and editing are necessary to ensure that media can be easily created, managed, and shared.
• Superior playback, search, and engagement tools support Echo360’s “anytime, anywhere” playback philosophy, as well as ensuring that students have the necessary tools to take notes, have discussions, answer questions, and provide feedback within the media environment.
• Centralized management and monitoring tools
• Learner analytics and dashboards are available both on the platform and via Echo360’s robust API.
• Integrations with VLEs, video conferencing, and in-room audio-visual systems, which work with customers’ existing digital investments.

The Echo360 Difference

Driven by Customer Experience and Satisfaction

When asked about what sets Echo360 apart, CEO Murad Velani said it is their customers. He further added, “We amplify the process and power of building trusting, collaborative relationships, and we work hard to earn and enrich our customer experiences at every level and touchpoint. The commitment and vision we share with our customers to inspire learning for everyone, anywhere, motivates us to serve them better every day.”

Taking Higher Education to New Heights

Echo360’s deep roots in higher education now support over 1500 institutions around the world with video, engagement, and assessment solutions that help instructors teach and learners learn. Echo360 Higher Education customers across North America, Europe, and Australia/New Zealand consistently cite 80%+ effectiveness in the technology’s ability to improve student engagement and outcomes and create equitable learning opportunities for all types of learners.

 From Wall Street to Main Street: Elevating employee training and engagement experiences

Echo360 spans industries and geographies with hundreds of blue-chip corporate partners leveraging EchoEngage solutions to enhance employee engagement and training initiatives, including:

Echo360’s Secure Solutions

Government agencies and affiliated military organizations trust Echo360 for the training of their current and future civil and military membership, including:

The “e3 Formula” for Inspired Learning

“Echo360’s vision of engaged and equitable learning for everyone—anywhere—has roots dating back to 1998. Through 20 years of organic development and M&A activity, our mission and ability to deliver the broadest portfolio of learning engagement solutions under ‘one roof’ are unique to Echo360. Our world-leading learning platform features an expansive suite of SaaS learning engagement tools, including video creation and management, polling, authoring, and content solutions, delivering a holistic learning engagement experience for instructors and students. This powerful portfolio of solutions and platforms represents the latest chapter of innovation, as we provide solutions for instructors, administrators, and learners around the world to deliver personalized learning experiences to achieve the learning transformations they seek,” stated Murad Velani.

The e3 formula for inspired learning fuels everything Echo360 does, for every individual and organization:

Engagement: In order for meaningful learning to occur, there must be actions and interactions with content, instructors, and students that deepen understanding and connection. Echo360 solutions enable the development and delivery of content in compelling, captivating ways with interactive polling and audience response and seamless integrations with popular applications like PowerPoint, Teams, and Zoom.

Equity: With so many different motivations, needs, pedagogies, environments, locations, and styles, Echo360 strives to ensure that all learners are able to engage and excel. The company’s solutions provide fair and equitable access to all, meeting or exceeding the highest ADA and WCAG standards for accessibility.

Evidence: Measuring impact in the face of increasing budget, talent, and organizational constraints is essential, as is Echo360’s’ commitment to measure engagement empirically. Echo360 solutions deliver experiences that have meaningful, measurable outcomes, empirically measured through dashboards and real-time reporting.

Taking on Challenges Head-On

Echo360 has successfully tackled the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic through the Echosystem platform portfolio, creating evidence-based, equitable, and engaged learning experiences for everyone, anywhere that goes well beyond a list of features.

Echo360 also provides differentiated value and impact through a keen focus and responsiveness to the needs of three key stakeholders in its Inspired Learning Trilogy:

Through responsive, trusting relationships with the roles and key stakeholders in its Inspired Learning Trilogy—through annual research and innovation grants, global advisory councils, global product user groups, and campus interns—Echo360 is best equipped to anticipate, meet, and exceed the needs of administrators, instructors, and learners

Echo360’s Culture: A DNA of Difference-Making

Echo360 is a sustainable (UN Global Compact), remote-first company with employees all over the world, deeply committed to and embodying the four core elements of their DNA in how they engage with customers and each other:

Client Testimonial

The Challenge: The Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University in Australia intended to develop a more egalitarian and interesting means for students to share their knowledge, insights, and experiences while still acknowledging the value of the written essay and was looking for a suitable platform to do so.

Echo360’s Solution: Echo360 transformed the way students demonstrated comprehension and how instructors provided feedback by using the EchoVideo platform.

According to Associate Professor Ronika Power, in previously assessing student learning via only the written form, “we were only catering to a proportion of our student population and therefore excluding some people from the discourse, and that’s not okay with me.” “Any modality that excludes more than it includes is not reflecting the kind of sensibilities we are hoping to represent.”

“Through the simple act of creating a video, students learned how to project themselves,” said Dr. Panos Vlachopoulos, Associate Dean for Quality and Standards. “They learned how to become storytellers and how to brand themselves. They developed skills that will go far beyond their academic discipline.”

In addition to students creating media content for assessments, Dr. Vlachopoulos used video to share assessment feedback with students and cited that students responded more readily to this feedback as they saw and heard his personality through video.

Additional benefits and improvements experienced by instructors and students using EchoVideo for assignments and assessments included the following:

• Increased collaboration among students, who were more willing to share videos with peers in ways they did not with written assessments.
• Video assignments are less susceptible to plagiarism and academic misconduct than traditional written assessments.
• Instructors using the EchoVideo platform reported it to be an effective platform to store and manage student assessments.

“What we saw through this research data is that the university really needed a universal platform, and EchoVideo was that platform,” said Jacinta Carruthers, sessional academic and research assistant for the Faculty of Arts. “It’s already embedded in our learning management system, and so what we really want to see is for this to be universally employed across the university with regard to media-based assessments.”

The Challenge: While students around the world are back on college campuses after the COVID-19 disruption, Faulkner university leaders recognizes that they still may need a way for students to learn from a distance as expectations of flexibility with reasonable pricing.

Echo360’s Solution: To enhance Faulkner University’s capability to deliver remote learning, Echo360 installed the EchoVideo platform in every classroom on all four university campuses. With EchoVideo, students can attend every class from anywhere, minimizing disruption or interruption of learning. Students can participate online, either by synchronously viewing classes that are live-streamed or by watching recorded sessions asynchronously.

“When the COVID pandemic hit, the university didn’t have a way to help quarantined students keep up with their course work,” says Tiffany Cantrell, director of Faulkner Online. “EchoVideo continues to give students the ability to attend class remotely, so they don’t fall behind and potentially have to withdraw from their classes.”

According to Cantrell, EchoVideo gives the university the ability to maintain continuity of teaching and learning if students are unable to physically attend class. She says campus life is a key component of the student experience, and traditional classroom instruction is the norm. But if a student is ill or has other legitimate reasons to be absent, they can get permission from their instructor to attend classes virtually.

All lectures and classes are automatically live-streamed and recorded. After class, students access and view EchoVideo and other course content through Faulkner’s learning management system, Canvas. They can watch recorded lectures and review content as often as they need.

“EchoVideo enhances the campus learning experience for our students. It is another way for us to support our students. They now have the ability to watch lectures online if they cannot attend class in person. This helps them stay out of the cycle of falling behind and having to catch up on work they miss,” extols Cantrell.

Cantrell further added that more than half of Faulkner’s students participate in intercollegiate athletic programs. But she also says that while participating in sports is one of the reasons why these students choose to attend Faulkner, their main objective is to complete their education.

Cantrell also stated that with EchoVideo, student-athletes will no longer have to make up classes or collect lecture notes from a friend. Even when they are traveling to athletic events, athletes can now attend class or watch lecture recordings on the team bus or from their temporary lodging. She adds that studying and academics are equal parts of the athletic culture at Faulkner.

Talking about the enthusiasm EchoVideo brings to the classroom, Cantrell said, “There is a lot of excitement during the first 10-15 minutes of any road trip, and the athletes are naturally pumped up.” “But then they settle down, the headphones come on, and students get out their laptops and get to work. All of our buses have Wi-Fi, and it is just part of the culture that whenever they’re traveling, they are expected to work and study, and if there is any possibility for them to watch a lecture live with EchoVideo, then they are expected to do that.”

Cantrell also added that there has been an increase in video captures and the number of people using EchoVideo each semester since the fall of 2020. She says EchoVideo has made the learning experience better for all students.

“It is easy to get behind EchoVideo because I see the difference it makes for our students. It gives our students consistency in their learning. Echo360 videos are automatically made available to them, and they can easily watch their lectures and review course content. They can see the places where they may not understand the material. It gives them an understanding of their own learning and makes their life easier,” concluded Cantrell.

Roadmap

Echo360’s profitable growth will continue to be fueled by momentum in market expansion and investments in product innovation, with three platforms launching in 2023:

1. EchoPoll: a new best of class SaaS polling platform building upon the company’s legacy and innovation in audience response and learning engagement.
2. EchoExam: a redesigned assessment SaaS platform already utilized by some of the world’s largest education and trade publishers, with on-line testing and enhanced mobile app features.
3. EchoVideo: significant investments in the company’s flagship video management platform increasing interoperability, accessibility, and student engagement.

“These innovative EdTech SaaS platforms, paired with our expanding network of channel partners across the globe, will accelerate our growth across all markets and geographies,” concluded Murad Velani.

About | Murad Velani

Murad Velani is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Echo360. Previously he was the President and CEO of Bluespire, a leading digital agency transforming healthcare, financial services and senior living marketing. Prior executive leadership includes roles as Chief Operating Officer at Jostens; President and COO at Group O, Archway, and Carlson Company; and several executive positions at Deluxe Corporation and IBM.

Mr. Velani has a BBA in Management Information Sciences from University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire; and a MS in Management of Technology from the University of Minnesota.

“Through 20 years of organic development and M&A activity, our mission and ability to deliver the full range of learning engagement solutions under ‘one roof’ are unique to Echo360.”