In 2023, just like in recent years, there have been numerous rapid advancements and changes in STEM education. Numeracy is increasingly becoming important in various disciplines and aspects of our lives, enabling us to understand our world better and make informed decisions.
At SOWISO, we continuously improve how we support STEM teachers to engage students with our virtual teaching assistant. Once again, we want to celebrate our achievements with you and express our gratitude to all our partners and team for helping us grow.
10,166 classes were held on the SOWISO platform, with an average of 40 students per class. 401,928 students have utilized our platform, which shows a 31% increase compared to the previous year.
Learners have viewed our theory pages 4,231,174 times and have spent a total of 3,846 days reading them. Our users have attempted almost 50 million exercises in total.
The tests given on the platform had an average of 13 questions, and the students submitted 371,231 tests, answering 4,672,990 questions.
65 institutions have used SOWISO worldwide. We proudly announce we are present on five continents!
Apart from working with universities and high schools, we collaborate with publishers like Sanoma Learning, Cappelen Damm and Liber.
We are thrilled to welcome new institutions that have joined in 2023, like KU Leuven, Penn State University, and Windesheim and Saxion Universities of Applied Sciences. We have significantly grown among previous partners such as Avans Hogeschool, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Fontys Hogeschool.
Besides, we have partnered with tutoring services, like Maria’s Online Course for Entrance Exam Preparation for the BBE program at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.
Thank you, everyone, for trusting us!
Our team has worked very hard to keep helping teachers streamline their work and improve students’ learning. We are delighted to introduce what’s new in 2023.
We’ve launched a new teacher user interface to simplify educators’ work. Now, we offer a more accessible and faster-to-use teacher environment.
From 2023, you can use exercises from SOWISO’s course material or your own created exercises on the SOWISO authoring environment in the RemindoToets testing platform. This integration will provide a streamlined experience for students between practice, formative, and summative assessment.
Now, you can share students’ answers while keeping their identities anonymous. This feature can be especially beneficial for pedagogical purposes. For example, you can show common mistakes when doing exercises and explain to the class how to solve them. Check out this article to learn more.
To assist students in performing their best on a test, you can provide them the option to review their entire exam or individual questions before submission. This feature allows test-takers to receive feedback on which questions they answered correctly. You can learn more about this feature here.
SOWISO is compatible with IMS Learning Tools Interoperability, enabling you to connect easily with your learning management systems (LMS) such as Canvas or Moodle.
With the LTI connection, you can sign in automatically to our platform without the need to enter your username and password again since they are synchronized with your LMS. We offer support for both LTI 1.1 and LTI 1.3, the latter being a more advanced, secure and improved method to connect your LMS to our platform.
Here is everything you need to know about integration via LTI in SOWISO.
We have organized a series of webinars to provide more information on using our functionalities effectively. During these webinars, we highlighted some of our most valuable features and presented educators with diverse options they might not have tried before.
It is important to note that our functionalities are flexible and can be used in many ways. Therefore, we encourage our partners to choose the best option that suits their needs.
You can learn more about:
We have created an extension with applications for our best-selling course. Now, each Basic Math chapter includes an additional package with exercises illustrating the practical applications of the theory explained.
This extension is ideal for higher education Science and Engineering programs.
In 2024, Social Science students will also benefit from using real-life math examples in their courses. Our extension with exercises for this area is coming soon!
To provide further support and guidance to students, the platform’s forum will be equipped with an AI math tutor instructed to answer specific math questions from students who are solving exercises in SOWISO. The AI is designed to mimic the interaction between a student and a tutor.
As part of our new teacher UI, we will soon offer a new test monitoring functionality facilitating educators to supervise the tests live. This will help instructors have a valuable overview of an exam taking place, support students and solve potential problems on time.
Our international brand name is now SOWISO, replacing Bolster Academy worldwide. This change does not affect our product or users, but it helps us simplify our work and streamline our operations to support our partners and students better. You can learn more about the reasoning behind this decision in this blog post.
We are committed to information security to ensure all our partners’ data is as safe as possible. Last year, we had the ISO 27001:2012 certification; in 2023, we obtained the latest ISO 27001:2023.
We continuously improve our practices and features to guarantee we meet the latest and highest security standards.
Since 2022, SOWISO has been part of Paragin Group. Together, we support everyone’s lifelong development of knowledge, skills, and competencies to aid them in reaching their full potential in life and their careers.
This year, we have a new member of the group: Coachview, which offers course administration software for trainers and course agencies.
Our collaboration among the group’s brands helps us share knowledge and upgrade our products, taking our journey to the next level. One example is our Remindo integration (mentioned above), which we are very excited about.
We are grateful to our team for making this possible and to all our partners for their trust and commitment to enhancing STEM education.
If you have any questions about these updates or suggestions for our future projects, please get in touch with us.
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