Agilix Hosting Open House at SXSWedu to Show Off New Offices, Recruit New Talent

Orem, UT (PRWEB) March 01, 2013

Agilix, Inc., the leading provider of automated learning infrastructure, invites all SXSWedu attendees to wrap up their Austin experience with a combination Open House and recruiting party. The event will take place beginning at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 7, the closing day of the conference and the beginning of SXSW Interactive.

Those interested in attending should go to the Web site http://sxswedu.agilixideaworks.com and RSVP.

The party will feature tours of the Agilix IdeaWorks offices where a team of former Human Code talent that makes up a substantial portion of the core of the new IdeaWorks professional services team at Agilix will be celebrating a resurrection of sorts. Human Code was a famous pioneer in the fields of multimedia and interactivity design and development that flourished in Austin from its founding in 1993 to its acquisition in 2000 by Sapient.

Chipp Walters, Senior VP of Agilix in charge of the IdeaWorks professional services team, was the founder and CEO of Human Code and is joined by a number of his colleagues from that highly successful earlier effort in building a design and development group for Agilix.

“We intend to apply a lot of what we learned in making Human Code such a rousing success to the new undertaking for Agilix,” Walters said in announcing the open house next week. “Agilix is uniquely positioned at the right intersection of the rapidly emerging educational technology market space. Our goal is to help educational publishers, VARs and consultants who serve the educational communities to develop world-class interfaces and user experiences on top of the xLi infrastructure for which Agilix is becoming famous.”

During the open house, Walters and his team will show off some of what he calls “ridiculously cool technology,” including the first-in-the-nation interface to the emerging cross-platform educational data exchange standard called the InBloom Data System (IBDS). In addition, an Agilix IdeaWorks project that is a featured part of a closely nationally watched Detroit schools experiment and that was shown at a White House briefing earlier this year will also be on display.

Refreshments will be served and on-the-spot interviews conducted for highly talented individuals interested in joining the Agilix IdeaWorks team.

ABOUT AGILIX

Agilix helps its partners deliver educational technology solutions through a combination of technology and services. The Agilix Extensible Learning Infrastructure (xLi) and associated starter kits for Learning Management Systems (BrainHoney), personalized learning (Buzz), and course registration (HoneyComb) power solutions for millions of learners across 60 countries. Agilix is a rapidly-growing company with significant expansion plans for the future. The founding management team of Agilix also founded Folio Corporation and built the Ancestry.com platform. For more information, visit http://www.agilix.com. Prospective Strategic Partners and Private Equity Investors should contact Agilix at partner(at)agilix(dot)com.

New Technology Offers Faster, Better, More Cost-Effective Path to Building Interactive, Personalized Educational Apps

Agilix Announces Professional Services Division, IdeaWorks, Headed by Strategic Design Manager Chipp Walters

Utah-based Agilix Labs, Inc., provider of modular learning infrastructure for K-12 and Higher Education, today announced the formation of a professional services division based in Austin to assist its partners in building world-class e-learning products on the company’s xLi platform.

The new division, dubbed IdeaWorks, is directed by Agilix Senior Vice-President and IdeaWorks General Manager Chipp Walters. Walters brings more than 25 years of experience forming and managing large teams that deliver award-winning, on-time, under-budget, large-scale projects. He has worked in the software development, multimedia, and graphic design industries, most recently as cofounder and managing partner of Shafer-Walters Group. Prior to Shafer-Walters, Chipp was the CEO of Austin-based Altuit and Human Code and was involved in creating many award-winning innovative interactive software products for industry leaders. In his new role, Walters will be responsible for assembling and managing the teams that build customized educational technology products on top of xLi.

“We are excited and enthused to have Chipp and his team join Agilix in this vital capacity,” said Agilix CEO Curt Allen in making the announcement. “We look at the professional services group as filling in the third leg of our corporate strategy — adding world-class design, implementation and integration services to our established technology platform and education application expertise.”

Walters and his seasoned team of technology industry veterans, with a combined 50 years of experience on a broad range of technologies, will work with Agilix partners who license the company’s flagship xLi platform. That product consists of hundreds of pluggable components and Web Services that can be mixed, matched and assembled into a large variety of customizable educational technology products.

“IdeaWorks rapidly builds and deploys world class solutions using 20% of the effort and resources normally required for learning products. This is because 80% of learning application functionality is already built into our xLi platform,” Walters said. “We can either take on the whole interface portion of the project or work as consultants to our partner’s design team.”

Allen adds, “You’ll also be hiring the team with the most xLi experience and knowledge on the planet: our own in-house experts.”

Members of the team have worked with some of the most prominent learning organizations in the world, such as Wiley, Pearson, HMH, Sesame Street, Macmillan, and Dell. Academic leaders on the Agilix team, with Ph.D’s in education technology, ensure that solutions are not just beautiful but also effective and in keeping with learning principles and practices.

Using a proprietary “5D” design process that takes a product from definition and discovery through design, development and deployment, Agilix Ideaworks can be brought on board at almost any stage of that process.

Since most technology-based educational products have a usable lifetime of 3-10 years, the 4-18 months that it will generally take to complete them using xLi and Ideaworks is a sound investment on the part of xLi licensees, argues Allen.

In addition to the design and development team support of IdeaWorks, Agilix can also provide partners with support, hosting and maintenance to suit their needs and those of their partners’ customers.

ABOUT AGILIX:

Agilix was founded in 2001 to enable innovative cloud-based solutions for tablets and other mobile devices — now one of the largest and most rapidly growing educational market opportunities worldwide. Agilix provides xLi, an extensible Learning Infrastructure for Partners; BrainHoney®, a CODiE award-winning Learning Management System for schools and universities; and Agilix Buzz, a Personalized Learning System for student-centered, competency based learning programs. Innovative learning solutions built upon the Agilix Learning Infrastructure have been used by millions of learners in more than 60 countries. Agilix is a rapidly- growing company with significant expansion plans for the future. The founding management team of Agilix also founded Folio Corporation and built the Ancestry.com platform. For more information, visit http://www.agilix.com. Prospective Strategic Partners and Private Equity Investors should contact Agilix at partner@agilix.com.

AGILIX ANNOUNCES BUZZ, FIRST COMPETENCE-BASED PERSONALIZED LEARNING TOOL, IS IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE THROUGH GOOGLE WEB STORE AND CHROMEBOOKS

OREM, UT, December 6, 2012 —- Agilix today introduced Agilix Buzz, the first competence-based, personalized learning application that is both scalable and fiscally viable. Buzz is immediately available on Google Chromebook laptop computers and through the Google Chrome Web Store. Other partnerships and availability channels will be announced in coming weeks.

Buzz is a creation of Agilix, built by the company’s ideaworks professional services division — in partnership with the School Improvement Network, Compass Learning, and other partners. It grew out of a need in the Education Achievement Authority (EAA) of Michigan for a radically new, student-centered personalized approach to learning.

Unlike other early personalized learning pilots that serve a few students in a few schools, Buzz provides a model that is both scalable and sustainable for all students in all schools.

“Current learning systems simply do not manage a personalized learning model where each student moves at his/her own pace, makes choices about learning materials, shares opinions about interest and effort, and participates in a learning community.,” said Dr. Mark Luetzelschwab, SVP Product at Agilix. “We designed Buzz from the ground up to handle these modern-day classroom requirements for student-centered, personalized learning.”

BUZZ’ PERSONALIZED LEARNING MODEL

In designing and creating Buzz, Agilix worked with the EAA of Michigan and with School Improvement Network to achieve a set of goals never before accomplished in educational technology. Students using Buzz in the classroom:

• are grouped by readiness, not age
• choose learning pathways and master concepts at their own pace
• self-assess their interest, understanding and effort
• are responsible for their own learning and to support the learning of their peers
• are monitored on productivity as well as progress

Teachers guide students through this learning process and provide individual, group, and whole-class instruction and intervention as necessary.

WHY BUZZ WAS DEVELOPED

In 2011, Chancellor John “Doc” Covington and Dr. Mary Esselman were given the opportunity to change education as we know it. Starting with 15 of the lowest performing schools in Detroit serving more than 10,000 students – with plans to extend to 100 schools serving 100,000 students across Michigan – they needed to change the system that had failed these students for years. Incremental improvement was not an option – a complete shift was necessary to maximize the potential of each and every student in those 100 schools.

The pilot program in the first 15 schools in Detroit is approaching its halfway point. This is what Dr. John Covington, Chancellor of the Educational Achievement Authority (EAA) of Michigan, has to say about the program so far.

“Imagine the possibilities that exist for students to excel when we meet them where they are rather than provide each student with the same thing. Technology makes what was previously impossible, possible, as each child works from an individualized learning path which he/she helps create. Think choice, access, opportunity and equity.”

THE FUTURE OF BUZZ

Agilix is working with its partners and plans to announce additional partnerships to deploy Buzz in other school districts throughout the nation in coming months.

School Districts interested in being considered for the next round of adoptions should contact Duane Call, VP Strategic Partnerships at Agilix. (Duane.Call@Agilix.com; 801.932.1221).

ABOUT AGILIX

Agilix is a privately held Utah corporation headquartered in Orem, UT. It offers a range of software and technology-based solutions and services to content providers such as educational publishers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators offering products to educational customers. Its products include xLi, Buzz, BrainHoney, and CourseChoice.

On October 9, 2012, Dr. Mark Luetzelschwab presented Buzz – a new model for personalized learning at scale – at the White House Executive Office Building as part of Datapalooza. Other presenters included Todd Park, United States Chief Technology Officer.

Agilix presents Buzz to U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan at the White House

On October 9, 2012, Dr. Mark Luetzelschwab presented Buzz – a new model for personalized learning at scale – at the White House Executive Office Building as part of Datapalooza. Other presenters included Todd Park, United States Chief Technology Officer.

Here’s a video of the presentation:

Studies will soon be forthcoming from the likes of Pearson Education, Dell, HP and A+ Learning.

We’re glad to announce our new website! We’ve been making lots of changes at Agilix and you should stay tuned for new announcements! If you’re looking for the Brain Honey website, it’s still there at www.BrainHoney.com.

If you want to hear more about our recent visit to the White House, please check out our Buzz White House page.

If you’re building a product designed to teach someone something in an automated self-paced environment, then you owe it to yourself to learn about Agilix and its Extensible Learning Infrastructure (xLi) technology. Because only with xLi can you be sure you’re able to create a product that is:

• exactly what you want
• less expensive and faster to complete
• guaranteed to be scalable and reliable

Until you evaluate xLi, you may well think your choices are limited to building something from scratch at great expense and at the sacrifice of time to market or buying an off-the-shelf solution which no amount of “tweaking” is going to turn into what you really need and want. And getting scalability and reliability either way? Forget it.

xLi is built by Agilix, the folks who brought you Buzz and BrainHoney, two of the most widely used educational tools. The xLi technology is the core software on which both Buzz and BrainHoney are based. We’ve also been selected for the development of large-scale educational products by such companies as Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Macmillan, Florida Virtual School and Dell Computers.

Gone are the days when you must make a build-or-buy decision when selecting technology on which to base your educational products. The new mantra is “Build, Buy or xLi?” And in that context, xLi comes out far ahead of the two traditional options.

And here are 4 good reasons why:

1. 80% of what you need to build is identical with what everyone building modern learning tools must create but xLi provides all of that functionality in a transparently usable package.

2. Reinventing the wheel is not only expensive and time-consuming, it’s also risky because it is practically impossible to test all of those operations in every possible combination, but xLi-based products have millions of hours of actual user testing behind them.

3. The most important 20% of your product — the portion that your users see and touch — always gets short shrift when budgets and schedules explode, but with xLi you can devote virtually all of your time and effort to getting that 20% perfect.

4. Software is an entirely different business from education. It is also fraught with risk. A significant percentage of software projects either never get finished or go substantially over budget and schedule. What business do you want to be in? xLi lets you focus your energy on the thing you do best: teaching and supporting those who teach.

xLi is better than buying an off-the-shelf tool that says it is “customizable” because:

The maker of the tool decides what you can customize and how far, particularly regarding the 20% with which you are most concerned, but xLi gives you 100% flexibility to create the tool you envision.

If you need even a slight change to the tool itself, you have little or no control over whether the change gets made, how long it takes or what it costs because the infrastructure is a closed, black box to you. But with xLi either your own development team or our IdeaWorks professionals can design and make changes in days or weeks at relatively little additional cost.

Off-the-shelf means proprietary, which means that things like the ability to interact with other learning systems your customers may already have invested in become large barriers that may well prove impossible or impractical to overcome. By contrast, xLi was built using what are called RESTful principles, allowing anything build with xLi to communicate freely with thousands of Web sites and applications built to adhere to that nearly universally adopted standard.

You can see why xLi is rapidly becoming the third and best alternative in the new build-or-buy-or-xLi decision making approach to learning tools technology.