Instructional Design Platform Enables Faculty to Create Their Own Adaptive Courseware

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Jul 23, 2015) - Smart Sparrow today announced the launch of education technology's first instructional design platform of its kind. Building on the success of their adaptive lesson authoring suite, the platform incorporates new templates, making it easier for faculty and instructional designers to create rich, interactive, and adaptive courseware, as well as data analytics tools that allow faculty and institutional leaders to follow student progress.

"We want to blur the distinction between instruction and technology. Academics should have more control over their courseware, so that lessons reflect their own teaching styles and excite their students," said Dror Ben-Naim, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Smart Sparrow. "Design tools often lock faculty into particular content or pedagogies and require too much time to develop and curate lessons and courses."

The new instructional design platform makes it faster and easier for faculty and instructional designers to collaborate in the development of adaptive courseware. It makes it especially cost-effective to design active learning experiences such as those that include rich simulations.

"As a professor of computer science, technology is at the heart of my classroom. But when it comes to creating engaging content that give students hands-on practice, I've found off-the-shelf content to be limiting. Smart Sparrow gave me control over both the substance and the pedagogy," said Richard Simpson, associate professor at New York Institute of Technology. "I've created over 200 lessons, which my students complete before and after class, leaving more class time for problem solving."

New platform features include:

• Collaboration and Organization Tools: A new dedicated space called "Classes" let instructors manage a single cohort of students across multiple lesson deployments, and better enable collaboration between the instructor and instructional designer.
• Lesson Analytics: New analytics capabilities makes it easier for faculty to follow student progress with the added ability to filter analytics by classes. They can now deploy any lesson as many times, to as many students as they like, and track them all in one, easy place.
• Enhanced Design Options: New templates allow instructional designers to create lesson outlines quickly, getting faculty feedback along the way. Alignment tools make it possible to spend less time on layouts and more time on pedagogy and student adaptivity.

Smart Sparrow tools are currently used in over 500 institutions around the world. Smart Sparrow powers international teaching networks like Inspark Science Network and the BEST Network. The instructional design platform will be available for faculty and instructional designers by end of July 2015. Over the following months, the ed tech company will continue to roll out more features that empower instructors and designers to create great courseware. 

About Smart Sparrow
Smart Sparrow is a learning design platform for next-generation courseware. It allows any educator to create amazingly engaging and adaptive learning experiences and then continuously improve them using learner analytics. Students are better supported and more motivated to succeed. Smart Sparrow believes in designing tools that support great teaching, and put faculty first to unlock the potential of adaptive learning. www.smartsparrow.com