Case study
SUNY Corning Community College Leverages the YuJa Enterprise Video Platform for Instruction and Other Uses Across its Campus
Adoption
SUNY Corning Selects YuJa Video Platform to Replace Former Product
SUNY Corning Community College is newer to using ed-tech platforms like the YuJa Enterprise Video Platform to aid in creating and managing educational content. In 2021, the institution was using a competitor product that had been acquired, and its contract was ending. Rather than transition to the new company, Dr. Kris MacDonald, Director for Teaching Innovation and Excellence and Director of Online Programs at the college, began looking for alternatives.
30+
Academic programs
4,000+
Students
1958
Founded
500 Acres
Campus size
“With our previous vendor, we were paying for storage. We were paying for auto-captioning, and we were paying to send out captioning. There were a lot of additional charges, and we were essentially using it as a repository,” MacDonald explained. “When our contract ended, I started looking for other companies that could provide us with a more comprehensive solution.”
MacDonald stumbled across YuJa, and after a demonstration, she said she realized “we would get far more bang for our buck.”
About the College
About SUNY Corning Community College
One of the community colleges in the State University of New York (SUNY) system, Corning Community College is a public community college in Corning, New York. It was initiated in 1957 and moved to its Spencer Hill campus in 1963. This two-year college serves three counties: Steuben, Chemung, and Schuyler.
SUNY is the largest comprehensive university system in the United States, with 64 institutions that includes research universities, academic medical centers, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, colleges of technology and an online learning network.
“We were paying for storage. We were paying for auto-captioning, and we were paying to send out captioning. There were a lot of additional charges, and we were essentially using it as a repository.”
Use Cases
YuJa is Used Campuswide by Instructors, Students, and Staff
In the beginning, MacDonald was looking for a solution that could help expand HyFlex and online learning opportunities that also integrated with D2L Brightspace, the college’s learning management system. With YuJa, she found a platform that could do that and more. In fact, YuJa is used for instructional and non-instructional purposes throughout the entire campus.
Faculty expressed interest in video editing software and have enjoyed using the editor, adding quizzes to videos, and seeing reports afterwards. “They can see if students watched the whole video, or did they just jump to the quiz?,” MacDonald said. MacDonald added she personally loves that storage is unlimited, auto-captioning happens automatically, and migration was made simple with very few snags along the way.
SUNY Corning’s tutoring center uses YuJa to provide workshops and instructional guides for students. Staff create videos for topics such as how to add or drop classes, how to complete various financial aid forms, and other frequently asked questions. Instructors and staff use YuJa to create voice overs and add annotations to PowerPoint presentations.
Student Use
YuJa Provides Easy to Use Tools for Students
MacDonald noted that approximately 59% of the institution’s student population is considered nontraditional, and YuJa makes it easy for everyone to use technology in the educational process.
Because YuJa is integrated with the LMS, students can easily use the video platform as well. For example, students can visually demonstrate what they learned in sign language courses. Speech and music classes have also found YuJa beneficial for capturing student assignments in a user-friendly manner, particularly compared to the previous processes that involved workarounds.
YuJa’s built-in accessibility features have also proven beneficial for accessibility services on the campus. In one instance, a student had a personal note-taker to help them capture notes in class. The instructor speaks quickly, so the note taker was having difficulty capturing what the student needed.
MacDonald showed the student that they could simply create an audio recording during the lecture, upload the file into YuJa, and automatically get the full transcript. “This made the student so much more comfortable and really helped boost their confidence in class,” MacDonald said. The student could then add their own notes to the transcript and has seen their grade in that course improve.
Rich Features
YuJa’s Video Platform has a Rich Set of Features Instructors Enjoy
As a former instructor, MacDonald said she appreciates the ability to use multiple cameras and inputs and on playback the viewer can organize their view in a way that makes sense for them. The institution is considering ordering USB cameras to plug into microscopes for science labs. “Not only can you put a camera over the microscope, but you can also use a USB camera to record the slide itself,” MacDonald shared. “For our science faculty, this will be a game changer.”
MacDonald also uses the YuJa Video Platform to record instructional videos, noting she likes auto captioning and the dictionary. “I really love the dictionary because my name is always spelled wrong, so I’m able to add names to the dictionary and over time it recognizes them,” she remarked. “That means I’m actually spending much less time editing captions because it gets it right on the first shot.”
Recommendation
SUNY Corning Initiates Systemwide Agreement
MacDonald said she feels so strongly about YuJa that she recommended a systemwide SUNY agreement, which has since been approved. “YuJa is fabulous,” she concluded. “If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have recommended it to 63 partner SUNY institutions.
The agreement enables any school in the system to license YuJa’s software to have access to the full set of features and tools, along with streamlined implementation and guaranteed low pricing. A number of SUNY’s institutions have already implemented one or more solutions from YuJa’s suite of ed-tech products.
Highlights
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SUNY Corning Community College migrated to YuJa from another platform to increase features and reduce costs associated with a video content management system.
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The college uses YuJa’s Video Platform for course content and learning, as well as in various non-instructional departments.
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The college has a high percentage of nontraditional students. YuJa makes it simple for everyone to use the technology in their learning journey.
“YuJa is fabulous. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have recommended it to 63 partner SUNY institutions.”
-Dr. Kris MacDonald, Director, Center for Teaching Innovation and Excellence and Director of Online Programs at SUNY Corning Community College
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