Product Overview
Yuja, meaning to weld or join together, is a rather new cloud based lecture capture company that wasn’t part of our last survey. Yuja came on our radar when a Duke MBA alumnus who helped start the company reached out to us. Yuja has appliance solutions together with both software- and browser-based capture, and of all the tools on the market seems on paper to offer one of the widest feature sets available, with innovative forays into the collaboration space, social, and mobile learning spaces. YuJa offers cloud hosting and supports 1080p HD video as well as live webcasting. The YuJa appliance (which has a much larger footprint than what we currently use with Panopto), has many input sources which allows for an end-to-end unified experience by offering a dual lecture capture with high-end video cameras, presentation devices like Smartboards and microphones, which include speaker tracking systems.
Core Distinguishing Feature Set
- Appliance-, software-, and browser-based recording
- External media ingest, including upload PPT files
- LTI integrations for all the major Learning Management Systems
- Realtime chats integrated with video conferencing: Start a chat conversation and then jump into a group project meeting with video and screen sharing with all members. Share and collaborate within a web browser with nothing additional to download.
- Team Project and Breakout rooms: Students in the course chat rooms can reach out to other students to ask homework questions, do post-class team exercises or course projects.
- Video Quizzes and Polls: Yuja uses a web-based creation tool to create quizzes where you start by inserting a YouTube video link or drag-n-drop an MP4 video file. Pop-up questions are then inserted into the timeline. Quizzes are automatically integrated into the activity feed which is accessible from LMS. Poll and quizzes can be reviewed on an individual and aggregate basis.
- Text Messaging: Instructors can message an entire group via text msg, email or discussion group post. Students can also receive email and SMS alerts when new course material, live webcasts or quizzes are available. Students have the ability to opt-in for the alerts, and can select how and when to receive text messages.
- Integrates with YuJa’s own cloud storage or other cloud stores, such as, Box, Dropbox and Google Drive.
Yuja and Duke
Yuja has an impressive range of features on paper and appears to be innovating in this product space. If we were actively looking for a new solution, we would definitely investigate them further.
