Author: Yerbol Adamov

To us at Avallain, the year 2020 bears special significance, as we approach the beginning of our third decade in business. For us, this is a cause for introspection as much as celebration. We are proud to say that Avallain has quickly evolved from a 3-person company into one of the world’s leading providers of software solutions for digital education. To represent this tremendous forward momentum, we have decided to develop and re-design Avallain’s visual identity.

What it means to represent Avallain’s identity

In 2000, two years before the official founding of the company, Ursula Suter and Ignatz Heinz, co-founders of Avallain came together to decide upon the brand that would represent their new company for years to come. They quickly agreed that the Avallain logo would have to be more than just a recognizable symbol – it would need to represent the very identity of the company they were hoping to build.

Since the founding days, the core of this identity has always been the will to use education technology as a way of enhancing human lives all over the world. Thus, Avallain has always focused on the human element, from learners and teachers to our customers as well as our own staff, and symbolized by our use of the symbol “ningen” – the Japanese word for “human”. Thereby, the original concept of the Avallain corporate identity was born.

Our human-centered symbolism was a statement of intent as much as a brand: Today, some twenty years later, we have successfully aspired to the ideal of an international company identity, building relationships and understanding with as many cultures and countries as possible by putting people at the center.

Avallain now holds a presence on five continents and employs over 15 nationalities in our staff. Representing our international approach, our focus on the human element and our values of harmony, stability and humanity leading toward exceptional quality and achievement, the Avallain visual identity went through some slight changes in design over the years.

Avallain has 20 employees and is working for Oxford University Press.

Avallain reaches 90 staff and serves 5 Million learners.

Times have changed, our values remain

When we decided to re-design our visual corporate identity, we knew we wanted to keep all of these ideals intact, as they still accurately reflect on the work Avallain does throughout the world of today. We also wanted to represent the current forward momentum of digital education, allowing the human “ningen” to move boldly – but not hastily – into the future.

Thus, our new visual design was born, representing Avallain’s commitment to its original values while commemorating the company’s new, dynamic role in the world of digital education.

Japanese sign for “human” → Reduced shape of the sign → Design mark for Avallain

Our new visual design reflects the identity of Avallain while also signifying the stability which we offer our customers as well as learners and teachers all over the world in an age of unprecedented change.

At the same time, the very act of changing our logo represents our commitment to ceaseless creativity and our willingness to improve upon the old whenever such a change is truly necessary – be it in terms of changing corporate identities or technological innovation.

Avallain fully prepared to grow and lead the digital education market momentum, ready for the next decades. 

The ability to communicate in English is an important skill that can have a tremendously positive effect on job prospects in a globalised world while opening up opportunities for further education as well. If students miss classes due to Coronavirus lockdowns, the repercussions are equally significant to their lives. Thus, we are thrilled that Richmond, one of the market-leading publishers of cutting-edge English language teaching materials, has boosted its digital content and made access to their learning platform easier and cheaper for learners throughout Latin America during this global health crisis.

Since the Richmond Learning Platform is powered by both Avallain Author and Avallain Unity, we are proud to be a small part of this generous offer to Latin American learners. As Ursula Suter, Executive Chairwoman and Co-Founder of Avallain puts it: “With Richmond making access to their high-quality learning materials even easier and more affordable for select users in Latin America, they can now use their time in quarantine to keep up with their studies without taking unnecessary risks. E-learning is actively helping to flatten the curve while improving the lives of students at the same time.”

Richmond is equally pleased with this development: “Providing effective English-language education to students in Latin American countries is vitally important to us,” says Deborah Tricker, Group Publishing Director at Richmond Santillana, “and we are happy to be able to continue to do that in the current global health crisis through the innovative digital content we offer on the Richmond Learning Platform, powered by Avallain. The company has been a huge support throughout this endeavour, providing us with cutting-edge e-learning technology at individualised prices and helping us every step of the way.” Avallain will further support Richmond to ensure the stability of their learning platform during the crisis.

Update (20.05.20): We are proud to announce that Our World 2e Online Learning Platform has won the 2020 SIIA Codie Award for Best ESL, ELL, or World Language Acquisition Solution.

In 2018, National Geographic Learning (NGL), a part of Cengage, approached Avallain with the idea of producing high-quality digital learning materials to accompany their world-renowned “Look” and “Our World” product line of English-language teaching materials. Today, we are happy to announce that the Our World 2e Online Learning Platform has been nominated for a 2020 SIIA Codie, one of the industry’s most prestigious awards. This nomination is a great recognition of the effort that went into the NGL online learning platform – and a testament to the highly advanced technological foundation of the platform, provided by Avallain.

What is the best way to learn English as a second or foreign language?

NGL’s Our World 2e Online Learning Platform provides primary English learners with learning materials from innovative interactive activities and games to stunning video and audio content. These digital materials are designed as supplements that augment the classroom experience with individualised learning paths that perfectly accompany the print edition of Our World. Meanwhile, teachers enjoy a robust Learning Management System to guide their students through activities specifically chosen for their individual learning progress. The Avallain platform is also appropriate for secondary and adult learners.

This two-pronged approach is made possible with Avallain technology. NGL first draws from Avallain Author’s pre-designed learning activity “blueprints” to create a highly varied assortment of individualised learning activities to accompany the print version of Our World, then Avallain Unity packages all of this into a coherent and intuitive learning platform, with an accompanying learning management system for teachers.

“By nominating NGL’s learning platform, the SIIA Codie Awards judges have recognised that great e-learning requires both amazing learning materials and a robust but flexible technological foundation to build upon,” says Ignatz Heinz, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Avallain. “National Geographic Learning has been able to produce a staggering amount of high-quality learning materials in a concise time frame, and we have continuously supported them throughout this process. This is how you keep refining all aspects of your learning platform, and I think this SIIA Codie Award nomination will not be the last for NGL.”

Since 2018, VERITAS, the largest educational publisher in Austria, has been offering its complete range of textbooks digitally. With interactive e-books, this innovative range of products supports learning success through individual content and targeted feedback – regardless of location. It was created with Avallain Author, our market-leading authoring tool, and made accessible via our feature-rich learning platform architecture Avallain Unity.

Throughout much of our planet, the Covid-19 virus is preventing everyday school life as we’ve always known it. But times of crisis are always a starting point for innovation and solidarity as well. In order to help teachers, parents and students to bridge the time between classes and to ensure the continuity of education, VERITAS and Avallain now offer free access to the entire digital offer described above.

“The individual learning success and continuity in education for all students in Austria is a heartfelt concern for VERITAS. We are pleased that with the support of Avallain we can provide schools in our country with free, fast and stable access to our digital learning offer”, says Mag. Nikolaus Donner, Managing Director of VERITAS.

“The advantages of digital education are numerous and, in addition to the possibilities for creating highly individualised learning experiences, the independence of location is a significant added value – especially in the current situation. We are proud that we are able to support our long-standing customer VERITAS with our technology and a service tailored to the crisis to keep school education in Austria running”, explains Ignatz Heinz, Co-Founder and President of Avallain.

Free access is available now at https://www.scook.at/.

In this challenging moment for our world, we in Avallain remain committed to playing our part, bringing to bear our 20 years of experience in the Digital Education industry.

More than ever, companies, institutions, and individuals need continuity in the central pillars of daily life. Education is one of these pillars, and we believe that if deployed well, online learning tools could greatly reduce the impact of the current situation to at least this aspect of our lives.

Preparedness and proactivity

As a digital company with a 100% smart work/home office setup and 100 team members in 15 countries, we had a head start. However, we are still working hard to ensure that we support one another in terms of homeschooling and family support.

School closures in many countries have radically changed the usage landscape. We are seeing exponential increases in platform use as homeschooling and distance learning initiatives take hold. So working closely with our clients, we responded quickly to increase infrastructure monitoring and capacity, ensuring an uninterrupted high level of performance.

Ultimately, we are in uncharted waters, so if things get tight, we will rely on our formal Business Continuity Plan, which has been designed over the past years to allow us automatically to implement fallback options and communication plans in times of crisis. Any client can ask for a copy of this, or for further details about our preparedness.

Human-centered and technology-driven solutions

An essential component of our Digital Education strategy is to address the growing need for real-time interaction and features that enable teachers and learners to minimise the impact of the absence of face-to-face lessons.

Central to this has been an immediate need for live video integration within learning platforms, which allows realtime interaction and online classes without much preparation. We have reacted quickly to this need, and this month are rolling out the first integrations with virtual classroom / conferencing tools.

Our commitment to education

Avallain is keen to help you to support learners and teachers in the challenging weeks to come.

During this public health crisis, we are offering a limited number of free accounts to our leading Avallain Author authoring tool for creating interactive e-Learning content.

Anyone interested can apply directly to info@avallain.com or through the contact form on our website. Our team will help speed up the process of implementation and delivery to ensure the continuity of learning. For institutions, and education departments, we also offer limited free consulting to help implement a fast, accurate, seamless and appropriate solution for the current needs.

We have over 20 years of experience in technology-enhanced education for institutional learning, and now more than ever we understand the value of cooperation and delivering fluent combinations of our own and third party technology as needed.

Appropriate solutions for challenging times

For language schools needing to switch instantly to an online solution, we have a ready-made product suite to offer that will bring you online seamlessly in minimal time.

Our content production department can help create a critical starting mass, and through our long collaboration with the leading educational publishers, we can easily enable access to the best digital learning solutions in the market.

A word of hope and thanks

On behalf of all Avallain members, we thank all the professionals who are keeping up their essential work in these times, including those who keep education running. Driven by education and science, our collective effort, clarity of focus and creativity will see us through this crisis.

Our best wishes to all our clients, partners and friends in the education world.

Avallain (avallain.com), a Swiss-based company, that provides award-winning education technology and tools to create, manage and disseminate educational content, and EDIA (www.edia.nl), Dutch-based, EdTech company applying Artificial Intelligence to create smart content for educational use, have announced a technical and commercial partnership.

Avallain and EDIA will work together by integrating EDIA’s Smart Content capabilities into Avallain’s online authoring tool Avallain Author and learning platform architecture Avallain Unity. EDIA applies natural language processing (NLP), a form of Artificial Intelligence, to create metadata. Its technology analyses educational texts in order to determine readability levels on the CEFR framework, extract keywords and classify topics in a taxonomy. EDIA’s capabilities will further enhance Avallain’s powerful tools and offer educational publishers easy access to metadata automation. These services can be applied both in the process of content creation in Avallain Author, where authors and editors get better tools to add metadata, and in the learning content management in Avallain Unity, where automated tagging can be used to tag and analyze existing content portfolio.

“We are very pleased with our cooperation as we have complementary technology that will help educational publishers in their digital transformation”, says Walter Montenarie, Chief Commercial Officer at EDIA. “The two companies work very well together as we share the same values and are determined to make an impact on education.”

“Our clients have the highest standards when it comes to developing and delivering digital learning products. We are proud to be providing them for more than 15 years with the tools and experience they need to implement these standards and excited about the cooperation with EDIA. Because EDIA’s Smart Content capabilities will add lasting value to our solutions and in EDIA we have found a new partner on our journey to empower companies all around the globe to unlock human potential with technology-enhanced education.” says Ignatz Heinz, President and Co-Founder of Avallain.

About Avallain

Founded in 2002, Avallain quickly took on the role as a pioneer in Digital Education. Located in the idyllic canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden in Switzerland, this was the ideal starting point for what was to come. Ever since our first steps in Digital Education, Avallain has grown into an international premium supplier with staff all around the globe and proud to be working with some of the world’s most ambitious brands, serving millions of learners in various educational settings. Together, our sole aim is to achieve a positive impact on human potential with technology-enhanced education.

About EDIA

EDIA education technology was founded in 2004 and is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In 2006, EDIA launched its first AI product for education, which used machine learning and natural language processing to curate online text sources for vocabulary training. The product won several international awards and is still widely used today. In recent years EDIA transformed into a SaaS platform by applying Artificial Intelligence technology to analyse text.

When it comes to aviation training, language skills are typically not the first thing that comes to mind. However, being able to quickly and successfully communicate information is a vital skill for prospective pilots. Thus, Latitude Aviation English Services Ltd. focuses exclusively on providing quality aviation English language training and testing solutions to aviation companies worldwide. Latitude now uses Avallain Author to develop and maintain Foundation, their web-based aviation English course, as well as Avallain Unity to create their bespoke learning management systems.

Focus on language: Why English skills matter in aviation

Many companies providing courses in aviation English typically do this as something of an afterthought, offering generalised English-language courses, with topics such as aviation or business English as “add-ons”. Latitude takes an entirely different approach: They provide aviation English training and testing solutions exclusively, as precise and unambiguous communication plays an immensely important role in aviation. Various international companies, from Qatar Airways to the Emirates Flight Training Academy, already rely on Latitude learning solutions to increase the language skills of their licensed operations personnel, ultimately improving overall safety standards as well.

“We were thrilled to be working with Latitude, not just because we relish working with high-quality teaching specialists, but also because of the highly specialised approach Latitude takes,” says Ignatz Heinz, Avallain Managing Director and Co-Founder. Ursula Suter, Chairwoman of the Board and Avallain Co-Founder, agrees: “Despite our wide range of customers, this clear focus on aviation English makes Latitude an entirely new type of partner for Avallain, and we are happy to bring our powerful tools into this specialised part of the language learning industry as well.”

Advanced Avallain software solutions for a niche market

Naturally, the highly specialised field of bespoke aviation English learning and testing materials offers only a limited number of customers. Thus, Latitude was looking for a premium software solution which is powerful and cost-efficient to boot. It quickly became evident that Avallain could offer precisely what they needed:

• Avallain Author: Latitude uses the highly advanced authoring tool in the development of content for Foundation, their 100-hour web-based aviation English course explicitly designed to prepare students for English-medium professional aviation training.
• Avallain Unity: Avallain’s learning management software architecture is used as the basis of Latitude’s SaaS solution, an easy-to-handle, highly reliable learning platform architecture. Latitude uses this to publish, deliver, assign, evaluate and market educational content.

Since both of our flagship products are designed to be highly customisable and reliable, Latitude and Avallain were able to introduce them into the existing Latitude ecosystem in a matter of weeks. Thus, Latitude now benefits from highly advanced software solutions used by the world’s largest publishers.

The future of aviation English training

After the successful implementation of Avallain products in Latitude’s software during early 2019, Henry Emery, Managing Director at Latitude, already has his eyes set on future cooperation: “We’ve entered into a mutually beneficial partnership which gives us highly advanced flexible technology to further enhance our learning programmes while providing Avallain with a glimpse into the world of aviation English training. We’re already working on new ideas to further build upon this relationship and we’re certain our customers will love what we have in store for them.”