YuJa

Avantages

Yuja's media creation and user interface is intuitive and extremely easy for faculty and staff to learn. Yuja also makes deploying multimedia in our LMS (Blackboard) a seamless experience. Yuja is both responsive and accessible, including auto-captioning of video content. In addition, Yuja offers sophisticated features for creating dynamic multimedia, such as in-line video quizzing that can send data to our LMS. Yuja also includes a robust analytics tool--which other competitors lack.

Inconvénients

Integration into our learning environment was a breeze, and you can use Yuja as an SSO stand-alone service or integrated into your LMS (or both, as in our case.) Our only "con" was that we did acquire the product sooner.

Avantages

Ease of use has made the capabilities of creating and managing recorded content by end users a popular tool in face-to-face and online courses. Every semester I see new faculty using YuJa as part of their classes and a growing number of ways asynchronous video is used in classes.

Inconvénients

There is little to complain about. Since the move to HTML5 from Flash, I have seen better stability and less issues from end users.
Tools like the video quizzes could be more robust for review and grading. (Though it works well in a simple format)

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir YuJa 

Pourquoi passer à YuJa

Avantages

File sharing and publication options are robust.

Inconvénients

This software has bugs that intermittently prevent video edits from being saved. An enormous amount of time and energy is wasted trying to make changes that ultimately don't appear in the media collection. Customer service is unable to find solutions.

Avantages

During the selection process we were impressed with the easy to navigate interface and how a large number of features were included in the product. These features included the captioning, live streaming, inline quiz tool and LTI connections to both Zoom and Canvas. During the spring of 2020 YuJa became one of your most utilized tools for moving faculty online and continues to be a tool moving forward.

Inconvénients

I think we should have taken advantage of the unlimited storage option during our purchasing stage. Also review the limits on auto captioning to make sure you have enough capacity. We did not forecast the 2020 pandemic but looking back would encourage purchasing as much storage and captioning as possible.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à YuJa

Avantages

We have had such great success with YuJa among the 11 institutions within the North Dakota University System. Lecture capture is the most used feature across all institutions. Faculty and students find it easy to use and video records and plays back easily across all devices. The YuJa Software Capture application allows users to easily configure what they want to record. This ease of use allows instructors the confidence to do more with their recordings past simply recording their computer screen.

Inconvénients

In the rare occasion that a video fails to upload, we often feel like the only option is to contact YuJa directly. While YuJa is VERY quick to respond, it would be nice to have more options for users to correct issues themselves. Eventually, it would be good if the proctoring tool had additional artificial intelligence features to identify cheating. Some sort of confidence monitor for instructors to quickly identify which videos they may want to reviews.

Avantages

I think the ease of use and the ability to ingest multiple different formats makes this product excellent. I like the way you can upload and organize your content and then the ability to create content using the lecture capture software and the video conference capabilities. The support and response time is phenomenal, they really go out of their way to make sure they answer all your questions and any issue is resolved in a timely manner. They also are very receptive to feature enhancement requests and seem to listen when you have a suggestion as evident by the updates and enhancements they make.

Inconvénients

We have been really impressed with YuJa and its hard to come up with Cons about them. Not that this is a YuJa issue nor necessarily their problem but transcodes that get created for each video eats up a lot of your storage capacity and not being able to bulk download into a single file is problematic for us. With that said, I know they are working very diligently to address those areas and others.

Avantages

YuJa has intuitive usability which is so important when introducing faculty to new technologies. We saw an exponential spike in adoption, not only because of our marketing, but through word of mouth. The interactive abilities--from the embedded quizzing, to the video editing, it has everything someone needs to use multimedia in education. Then there are the analytics! All of this, with consideration given to ADA compliancy, YuJa has it all.

Inconvénients

Some of the interface integrations in the LMS could be improved. What I mean is that instead of opening up in an entire new tab, having it within the LMS would save some of the confusion of returning to the course--at least the way we have it integrated.

Avantages

Allows for higher quality video uploads, essentially allowing us to future proof as screen get better
Good granular control

Inconvénients

navigation and and search can be rather confusing
Integration with LMS is good, but what all happens isn't entirely clear

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir YuJa 

Pourquoi passer à YuJa

Avantages

As an engineer, you are always constantly learning. While working, I have been a user of YuJa to watch lecture videos seamlessly. I love the ability to fast forward and speed up videos with no delay. The biggest pro of using yuja is its integration into my university canvas page. With a simple click, I am able to rewatch lecture videos with no delay.

Inconvénients

A small issue that I had was navigating through the UI. While videos were easy to access, I would like if there was a dark mode instead of the default white background.

Avantages

The absolute BEST customer support I have ever worked with. I work in higher education and have never met a company that is willing to have faculty, staff, AND students use their support line for assistance. They have implemented feature requests in as little as 8 weeks and are normally responsive within hours to get problems fixed.

Inconvénients

They are a growing company, there are things they have not dealt with before. If you have speciality integrations and needs they are willing to work with you on those things but you will have to request them and wait for the feature in the future. They are willing to work you, it just takes time to get features like that ironed out and working.

Avantages

The auto-closed captioning feature as part of the lecture capture is the feature I like most. Yuja is easy to use, it's versatile for lecture capture, editing, video conferencing, and continues to be an essential communication tool in our supported arsenal.

Inconvénients

Features I have requested in the past have been added and the support is fantastic so I can't really complain. Something I would consider adding are open video conference rooms so instructors don't have to create new rooms for virtual sessions. I also think some additional product documents could be added explaining each feature, like how to link a video, and any new features in updates.

Avantages

I love the support team. They are top notch and go above and beyond to help our faculty, staff, and students. I love how fast video hits the cloud ts processed. The statistics are useful, the closed captioning has improved, and they keep adding more features. Also, they are really good at listening to customer requests and adding enhancements based on feedback.

Inconvénients

Initially the captioning wasn't as good as some others but it's improved vastly. Also, it wasn't feature rich for editing video, but that's not really what it's for and they offer plenty. We've had issues with the videos playing in certain browsers, but usually we get it worked out fine.

Avantages

Yuja allowed students to videotape themselves and upload the video so that it could be viewed by the professor.

Inconvénients

Some students were very unfamiliar with Yuja.

Avantages

The fact that it offers video conferencing for free is a great option, and the layout of the interface is very user-friendly with the way chat and users are displayed around the virtual whiteboard.

Inconvénients

Connectivity seems to be a constant issue for all users connected. Video and audio are often jumpy and tend to skip in and out throughout the online class experience, which makes it difficult to facilitate discussion.