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YouSeeU founder Jeff Lewis, an associate professor of business at Metropolitan State University in Denver, was struggling to find an accurate, reliable way to assess his students’ verbal presentation skills when he taught online courses. So in 2009, he went about creating a platform to allow him and other educators to solve the dilemma of how to verbally assess students in an online course environment.
“As the higher-ed market has become more competitive, it’s now more important for institutions, especially with their online course offerings, to find a way to improve the experience for students,” VP of Sales Ed Dillon said. “The top reason students give for dropping an online course is that they feel no connection to fellow students or their teacher.”
Via recorded video YouSeeU allows a collaborative, assignment-driven assessment of the verbal skills of online students. For students, the class experience in enhanced through producing video-based presentations, group discussions, Q&A sessions and the opportunity to get and give feedback to and from the instructor and their peers. “It makes online learning a much-less isolated experience,” Dillon said.
As an educator, Lewis made sure to design the system around academic work flow and integrates with existing Learning Management Systems (LMSs), so it has the flexibility to be used in creating courses, developing assignments, soliciting feedback, and grading student performance. Individual students are able to record themselves to a laptop, tablet or mobile device giving speeches, demonstrations or group presentations. Both students and schools can be confident that the system is secure and protects users’ privacy.
Today, YouSeeU is in use at 45 institutions across the county, including the Penn State World Campus, as well as the Marshall School of Business and the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. Since version 2.0 of YouSeeU was introduced last spring, more than 25,000 video submissions have been posted to the system.
