HR giant Workday buys education startup to get into employee training
When father-son duo Jim and Charlie Stigler founded Zaption Inc. in 2012, they set out to create a platform where teachers can easily share educational videos with students. But four years and numerous academic customers later, the outfit is becoming part of Workday Inc. in a move that will see its focus shift to an entirely different market: Business workers.
The human resource management giant plans to shut down Zaption’s service and incorporate its key capabilities into an upcoming cloud-based training environment called Workday Learning. Workday didn’t provide any specifics, but it’s not hard to see how the acquisition might complement its value proposition. The startup’s platform lets educators embed questions, images and other content in their videos to improve the learning experience, and then measure the results via a built-in analytics console. Its dashboard displays everything from the number of people who’ve taken a given course to the amount of time they spent on each video and their satisfaction levels.
The functionality holds the potential to greatly streamline corporate training activities. A retailer, for instance, could create multiple versions of a sales tutorial and assess their effectiveness in Zaption’s dashboard to find the best one. Workday will likely integrate the technology into its lesser-known student management service as well to court higher education institutions. The platform has a feature for distributing learning materials that could be integrated with the startup’s technology to ease the sharing of video content.
Until Workday Learning become available, however, the outfit’s users will have to rely on other video training platforms such as EDpuzzle and HapYak. Zaption said in a blog post that its service is scheduled to go offline on September 30, which should provide more than enough time for customers to migrate their content.
Image via Pixabay
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