Ayaz Quraishi, Edly: “content has to be engaging enough to keep your learners focused on it”

In today's world, the intersection of finance and technology is rapidly transforming the financial industry, giving rise to the term fintech.

The application of advanced technology is driving innovations in financial services, improving the efficiency of financial transactions, and enhancing the customer experience. With fintech poised to play an increasingly important role in the future of finance, educating students in financial technology is becoming more critical than ever. This is where an LMS service providers like Edly come in handy.

To talk about the importance and biggest challenges surrounding eLearning today, we reached out to Ayaz Quraishi, Growth Manager at Edly.io – a company that helps organizations build eLearning platforms by leveraging Open edX’s open-source technology.

Tell us more about your story. What inspired you to create Edly?

Edly was the culmination of over five years of experience in the edTech and eLearning industries.

Combining nearly a decade of product development with our experience delivering eLearning services to clients including edX.org, Open edX, MIT, Philanthropy University, and more led to the creation of Edly, Arbisoft’s premiere eLearning ecosystem, and LMS.

Can you introduce us to your learning management system? What are its key features?

Edly is a comprehensive eLearning ecosystem combining an easy-to-use course authoring suite, with a fully white-labeled student portal, and a modern, student-centered learning management system.

Although there are numerous features, our customers love our low-cost, high scalability, and free, built-in course authoring suite.

Online learning can often seem boring and time-consuming. What techniques do you use to ensure engaging and effective training?

Our platform is designed for multimedia content, allowing instructors to combine a variety of materials for a more engaging course experience.

Our system also supports various learning delivery models: instructor-paced courses, self-paced courses (i.e. student directed), synchronous learning, and asynchronous learning, ensuring that content can be delivered in a way that maximizes participation and completion.

In your opinion, what are some of the biggest mistakes teachers and institutions make when it comes to online learning?

Personally, I’ve found that instructors rely heavily on traditional eLearning content, like text and simple problem/question types.

Engaging in online learning shouldn’t be limited to the same media used in in-person learning: leveraging videos, simulations, and interactive problem types allows for higher-quality online learning.

Besides regular employee training, what other practices do you think are extremely important for every business?

With regard to online education and eLearning, businesses need to understand the importance of making training relevant, timely, and purposeful.

Employee training often feels like a burden or to-do; it needs to be transformed into something that employees actually want to complete and something worth learning.

What would you consider to be the biggest challenges surrounding online learning nowadays?

Between social media, streaming content, and near 24/7 availability on their mobile devices, one challenge is competing for the attention of learners (e.g., students, employees, etc.) – your content has to be engaging enough to keep your learners focused on it.

Another challenge is the maintenance of content. With a need to keep content up to date, change control and reusing assets in your courses are becoming increasingly important.

Why should each SCORM course live independently; couldn’t some of the material in Course A also be available in Course B? If so, how can you simplify the process of making changes in one place while pushing it out to Courses A, B, and even C and beyond?

Since the education sector is your main field of focus, how do you think this industry is going to evolve in the upcoming years?

With the introduction and evolution of AI and machine learning, we’re going to see a need to automate and simplify online education. We need to be able to address a learner’s inclination to ask a chatbot to review an hour-long course and summarize it for them.

We also need to leverage this same technology inside our courses, to generate new scenarios and content for learners to address on the fly.

In this age of ever-evolving technology, what are the key security measures everyone should implement on their devices?

Identity verification and multi-factor authentication are both important to ensure that the correct user is accessing their accounts and devices.

Beyond that, installing VPN access to access secure content and systems is another critical security measure.

And finally, would you like to share what’s next for Edly?

As of this year, we’ve debuted two new product plans for our Edly SaaS product with enhanced features and scalability. We also have major updates to our business intelligence connectors, gamification and badges, and custom email experiences coming out this year.

Outside of our SaaS solution, we’ve doubled down on our commitment to open-source educational technologies by significantly expanding our investment in and development of the Open edX platform. All of this means newer, higher-quality eLearning and LMS experiences by Edly are right around the corner!