Motivis Launches Free Community Building Tool for Higher Ed
Built in collaboration with the Salesforce Foundation, the Salesforce Higher Ed Advisory Council and Cornell University
Salem, New Hampshire, October 26, 2015 (Newswire.com) - Motivis Learning, an educational technology company developing next-generation learning technology, today announced the launch of Unity, a free community building platform designed specifically for higher ed. The tool blends an intuitive front-end experience with powerful back-end tools and information to help both students and educators connect to achieve their goals.
Built in partnership between Cornell University, Motivis Learning, the Salesforce Foundation and the Salesforce Higher Ed Advisory Council (HEAC), Unity was funded by a Force for Change grant from the Salesforce Foundation and Motivis Learning as part of its commitment to Pledge 1%.
"Good-bye, communication gateways. Good-bye, listservs. Hello, engaged students who can find experts and resources to help them achieve their goals."
Rebecca Joffrey, Director of Interactive Services, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University
“For most higher ed institutions, it’s a battle to stay connected with student expectations and provide them what they need to succeed,” said Brian Peddle, CEO at Motivis Learning. “It doesn’t have to be that way. Unity enables and encourages all parties in the learning experience to engage and to interact more meaningfully for better academic outcomes. It is all about relationships.”
“At the Salesforce Foundation, we’re dedicated to putting our world-class technology in the hands of universities to help them reimagine higher education,” said Rob Acker, CEO, Salesforce.org. “Unity is a great example of technology built by the community, for the community, and we’re proud to have helped to make it available to all higher education institutions.”
Already implemented at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, this powerful community-building tool was designed specifically with the needs of higher ed in mind and layers seamlessly on top of Salesforce Community Cloud--making it easier and quicker for schools to get started with a Community right out of the box. Salesforce Community Cloud allows companies to create trusted destinations to engage with customers, partners and employees in personalized, connected and mobile communities. With the additional features, Unity provides customizations tailored to a higher ed environment, speeding and easing adoption.
“Unity puts community at the heart of the student experience, allowing users to communicate freely and help one another,” said Rebecca Joffrey, Director of Interactive Services at Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “Good-bye, communication gateways. Good-bye, listservs. Hello, engaged students who can find experts and resources to help them achieve their goals.”
Unity provides the following features for higher ed institutions:
- Branding: School can easily customize Unity with their own logo or wordmark, custom colors, and photos and graphics--on the homepage and throughout the product.
- News and Events: Schools can add news content and accompanying images to their Community on both the homepage and on a dedicated news section. Unity also allows users to easily create, tag and share events.
- Profiles: With Unity’s custom profile functionality, schools can classify users with higher ed-specific custom roles like Student, Alumnus, or Club Leader in lieu of the Customer designation. Unity also allows custom profile fields, so schools can add any field they would like to a members’ profile pages, such as office hours for faculty, major for students, etc.
- Themes and Tags: Unity allows the use of broad categories, called Themes, and enhances the native Tags functionality to improve searchability and discoverability of content.
- Groups: Unity provides a Group Manager Feed (visible only to group managers), Group Metrics and Group Events.
- Insights: Student behavior and activity progress can be monitored to identify student behavior and preferences.
The best part? Unity and all of these valuable features are free. As part of Motivis Learning’s commitment to Pledge 1%, the company is offering Unity for free as both an open-source version (available on GIT) and a fully-managed free version on the Salesforce AppExchange--to which Motivis will continue to provide support and updates. The highly flexible, configurable and open-source design allows any university to leverage the solution and tailor it to its individual needs, while the managed package offers built in versioning support and automatic, seamless updates.
To learn more about Unity, visit Motivis Learning on the web. To get started today, check out Unity on the Salesforce AppExchange.
About Motivis Learning
Spun out of the Innovation Lab at Southern New Hampshire University, Motivis Learning is disrupting typical educational technology—and traditional models of education. As a pioneer in Learning Relationship Management, we build the technology that lets you build dynamic relationships with your students. Dynamic relationships lead to positive outcomes—our ultimate mission. To achieve this mission, we’ve developed a fully-integrated suite of learning tools (built on Salesforce) that achieve the complete, yet elusive, 360-degree view-of-student through an easy, familiar interface. Think fully integrated LMS, SIS, community engagement, ePortfolio...everything you need to surprise, delight and engage students at every point of interaction, from prospect to alumnus. The result? Happier, more successful students. Happier, more successful educators. Happier, more successful everyone.
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