What we announced at aXcelerate Day 2023

It was incredible to see so many of the aXcelerate community at our inaugural aXcelerate Day! We loved sharing our new, upcoming and upgraded products and features, as well as hearing from our valued partners. 

What we announced at aXcelerate Day 2023

Pioneering the education technology landscape for over a decade, the aXcelerate platform has enabled virtual, blended, and traditional learning environments across many industries in the VET sector. At aXcelerate Day 2023, we announced new and improved product features and capabilities that empower you to manage every aspect of the student journey. Our commitment remains steadfast in enhancing the capabilities and fundamental experiences of our system, focusing on several key areas: 

Elevating your experience with the aXcelerate Learning Management System (LMS)

Launched a little over five years ago, our LMS has played a pivotal role in the aXcelerate ecosystem to enable the delivery of a diverse range of training. Improving the core experience of our LMS has been and will continue to be a key focus for aXcelerate. In particular, we’re committed to: 

• Enhancing the Learning Experience: Supporting retention and engagement
• Streamlining Authoring and Management: Empowering you to deliver dynamic and tailored course materials and content faster
• Promoting Interoperability: Facilitating seamless integration with third-party applications and systems, ensuring smooth data flow and compatibility across various platforms.
• Safeguarding Academic Integrity: Implementing robust measures to uphold the authenticity of academic assessments, particularly in the era of advanced AI technologies.

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Introducing: Question Banks

Our first big product update we announced was Question Banks. Question Banks allow you to:

• Create groups of questions that can be reused to author assessments
• Deliver randomised question sets to students, ensuring academic integrity and compliance with industry standards.
• Seamlessly reuse questions and content across multiple assessments, with centralised updates for streamlined management
• Enjoy an intuitive user interface with advanced tagging and filtering functionalities, enhancing your assessment authoring workflow
• Access more mapping contexts and flexibility

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aXcelerate Turbo users can access Question Banks early now. This feature will be released in early 2024, with more information to come soon. Let us know if you're interested in using Question Banks here.

Introducing: The new aXcelerate Trainer App

We’re moving our Trainer/Assessor App into our modern app framework to vastly elevate the app’s user experience, with an initial focus on high-use features to support the core experience. Improvements to our feature set will grow over time, expanding its functionality and versatility.

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 Key features of the revamped Trainer App include:

• A user-friendly interface and bulk-marking tools for easy assessment marking, with a focus on observation assessments
• A comprehensive overview of courses and assessments
• Future enhancements include attendance marking and support for marking various assessment types

The new app will initially be available in the current aXcelerate Supervisor app. The feature release will be in early 2024.

Employee Training in aXcelerate (Conceptual and coming soon)

We’re planning continuous LMS improvements for employee training in aXcelerate. This will involve: 

• Reframing course delivery towards roles
• Enhancing learner self-service
• Manager-Direct Report views
• Learning content

Unlocking Flexibility with Learning Content (Conceptual and coming soon)

aXcelerate is uniquely positioned between training organisations and content providers. We have the opportunity to solve friction and ensure content is tuned to the aXcelerate platform – unlocking flexibility for you and broadening your appeal.

In the future, we’ll be partnering with content providers to resell high-quality material, as well as creating ways for Lessons and Assessments to be imported into your aXcelerate account.

Stay tuned for more information in 2024. Let us know if you're interested in using this feature here.

Elevating your experience with the aXcelerate Student Management System (SMS)

Central to our ecosystem is our Student Management System. Acknowledging the diverse needs of our users, we’re dedicated to refining and enriching the user experience within high-traffic areas, enabling smoother administrative workflows and streamlined course management. Our imminent focus lies in enhancing the workshop management experience to optimise course delivery and empower educators to concentrate on providing superior training to their students.

Workshop Improvements and Refresh

As part of our larger strategy over the coming year for improving core aspects of our system, we’re overhauling the Workshops interface while streamlining everything related to Workshops to vastly improve the experience for Admins, Trainers and Third Parties.

Areas of focus within Workshops include search, booking statuses and attendance.

We’re also making significant improvements to the way Sessions, Locations, Timezones and Trainers are managed for Workshops:

Sessions

• Updates to the ‘Complex Date’ System
• A new interface for managing and scheduling workshop dates
• Includes the ability to apply changes to many sessions at once

Locations

• Delivery locations are now used for accredited and non-accredited 
• This allows you to more easily save and manage recurring locations
• Can still just have a free text location

Timezones

• Locations can now also have timezones set
• Helps facilitate course management and delivery for interstate & international learners and trainers

Trainer Management

• Easier to allocate trainers against sessions
• Added a bulk-update trainer tool to help manage trainers and assessors for linked classes, workshops and assessments from a single location

These improvements are currently accessible in your aXcelerate Staging account. We’d appreciate your feedback on the changes to help us inform our feature release.

New Media Library

We’re implementing a new Media Library aimed at improving the content authoring experience across the system.

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More upcoming improvements include: 

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Check out our Release Notes and What’s New videos to stay up-to-date.

Online Enrolments

A positive enrolment experience is vitally important to attracting and retaining learners. We have a renewed focus on improving the current Online Enrolments process and supporting the future state of Online Enrolments.

Learner Onboarding

We know that accredited enrolments require a lot of information to be provided by learners, which can lead to a drop in conversions. We’re making changes to help reduce enrolment friction with low up-front information, and follow-up of more detailed information.

Learner Portal Course Catalogue

We want to give you more ways of retaining your learners and delivering more value. To do this, we’re planning to add the ability to display a course catalogue within the Learner Portal to allow learners to enrol into more courses. 

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AI in aXcelerate 

Exciting developments with integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology into aXcelerate are on the horizon. Anticipate a transformation in the way you’ll be able to manage your training. 

Assessment Question Generation - Coming Soon 

AI presents a new way to migrate your content. With Assessment Question Generation, you’ll be able to prompt the aXcelerate LMS with text and uploaded files, such as a PDF, and automatically create questions directly in the system.

Generative Content – Coming Soon

Generative Templates can style, format and add dynamic fields automatically, while Generative Content Editors can help streamline content writing, including authoring assessments or creating contact notes.

Contextual Learning Assistant (Conceptual only)

AI can be helpful in providing greater information accessibility. We’re investigating how AI could assist us in delivering a Contextual Learning Assistant. A feature like this would empower learners to engage with a personalised digital tutor, facilitating contextual information based on course materials. 

Auto-Marked Short Answer Questions (Conceptual only)

We understand that marking assessments is a crucial aspect to get right for training organisations. However, assessment marking can be incredibly time-consuming for assessors. There is an opportunity for AI to help with marking subjective assessment responses based on a rubric or marking criteria.

The possibilities for integrating AI with aXcelerate’s feature development are endless. The integration of advanced AI features represents an exciting leap forward in our student and learning management system. With an unwavering commitment to upholding data integrity, privacy, ethical standards, and quality, the aXcelerate team is excited to deliver a host of innovative features and an ongoing commitment to exploring further enhancements in the future.

aXcelerate Work-Based Learning

On-the-job training is an important part of modern training for many organisations. Our native WBL solution transforms a predominantly manual process into a complete digital solution for apprenticeships, traineeships and placements. This aims to give a better solution for everyone involved, reduce costs, save time and give learners a digital portfolio to capture meaningful evidence.

Our areas of focus for WBL include: 

Improved Learner & Supervisor experience

• More ways to access logbooks
• Logbooking needs to be as simple and flexible as possible
• More streamlined ways to access data and information for Supervisors

Improved Admin experience

• Automating learner progression
• Streamlining system setup
• Better reporting and analytics
• More scheduling flexibility

Thank you

The aXcelerate team extends our heartfelt gratitude to each and every aXcelerate Day attendee. Your enthusiastic participation and valuable contributions truly made the event a resounding success. We've answered some of the great questions we received on the day here.

We deeply appreciate your time, engagement and active involvement, which helped create an atmosphere of collaboration and shared learning. We strongly appreciate your feedback on the event.

Thank you once again for your continued support. We look forward to seeing how you continue to positively impact your industry through providing world-class training.