Introduction
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This LMS offers customization at levels we have yet to see in other platforms. Its AI translation and content creation services are uncommon features you would hardly find in other learning and coaching systems.
Ratings
Ease of Use
Best For
Key Differentiator
Price
Free Trial
PROS
- It is completely free to use for unlimited content creation and deployment. Their paid version is also one of the most affordable for learning management systems.
- Easy onboarding. It takes only about five minutes to get started on EdApp. Inviting trainees and coaches is just as easy.
- The software allows you to connect to your proprietary company tools with its open API functionality.
- EdApp provides a great deal of resources that gives you all the information you need about how the system works. There are also some tips made available to make your learning management process easier.
CONS
- You always have to learn new ways to use the app as they release updates frequently.
- EdApp’s video limit is only 10 MB. This means you will have to shrink high-sized videos which, subsequently, reduces the quality of your videos.
- Some users complain about the analytics feature. It is usually slow and it sometimes takes a long time to pull out data into a CSV file.
SafetyCulture is a global tech company that provides digital solutions for employers and workers alike. Their flagship product, iAuditor, is an inspection management software that allows you to build checklists, perform inspections, create reports, build workflows, and capture workplace safety issues all from a mobile device or tablet.
Other products under the SafetyCulture umbrella include EdApp, their learning management software(LMS), SHEQY, a lone worker safety solution that protects on-field workers in real-time, and Mitt insurance — an Australian-based insurance company.
SafetyCulture is one of the few Aussie unicorns with a whopping valuation of over $2 billion. They are committed to adapting to change and driving innovations.
EdApp, which they recently acquired in 2020 is one of the most affordable LMS in the market. In fact, all EddApp features are completely free with no limitation on number of users or lessons deployed. You only pay for some advanced features. Considering the free numerous features you get, it is quite the offer. An example of such features is the authoring tool. With this tool, you can use in-built system templates to deploy content faster and in a personalized format. We will address this feature in detail in the key features section.
EdApp LMS
While reviewing this tool we noticed that SafetyCulture takes a blended learning approach with EdApp. So you should expect to see a combination of theoretical and practical learning processes. The theoretical aspects entail content creation and dissemination; which you do with the aid of the authoring tool and templates provided on the platform. There are also practical repetitive and spaced assessments to further reinforce theoretical points.
Most of EdApp’s LMS features are geared towards user engagement and interactivity. Instead of a static layout of lecture slides, your users get a user-friendly adaptive layout they can interact with. Level of interaction depends on the combination of templates you choose to build your micro lesson. One of the interesting templates we came across is the image selection template. When the image selection is in use, learners can click on images displayed on the screen to get additional information on the image. This is a great way to educate learners using an array of modes (visual and text in this case) while urging their participation as well.
Another template that facilitates participation is the drag-to-match layout. As the name suggests, the learners will be prompted to drag images to match texts and vice versa. In essence, this array of templates makes it possible for you to create eventful and engaging micro lessons for your learners.
If, perhaps, you have your lecture slides in powerpoint format, you want to make it more engaging with these templates too. EdApp allows you to import directly from powerpoint so you can edit the content to your liking.Creating engaging content requires you add visuals like images and videos to emphasize points made in the lesson. EdApp makes it easy to do just that with their native canva integration.
One other thing EdApp does that we really like is the ability to segment learning experiences into customizable user groups. This feature works well with their multilingual capability. By defining user groups, you can provide personalized learning materials in different languages. A good use case for this would be for companies that have global teams. User groups are also nested and hierarchical. So you can create learning material, share it with the parent group and it flows down to the other child user groups.
Asides micro lessons and quizzes, EdApp provides two additional learning vehicles — discussions and virtual classrooms. This goes back to the blended approach learning we discussed earlier. The app provides several mediums to impart knowledge. With discussions, admins can create forums where learners can revise their understanding of lessons and discuss as peers. It also gives coaches the opportunity to answer any lingering concerns employees regarding what has been taught.
Although EdApp finds its best use case as an LMS for company internal training, they provide a work-around for educational services that want to monetize their intellectual property. It doesn’t have an in-built payment gateway but you can use the open API functionality to build a payment portal on the website.
SafetyCulture has the habit of releasing updates frequently; sometimes, as frequently as every week. For instance, they recently released the PPT converter 2.0, a more adaptive iteration of the powerpoint converter feature that gives you more flexibility to edit and turn static powerpoint slides to interactive content. The frequency of updates can be cumbersome to keep up with since you have to learn about new features regularly. But SafetyCulture eases this burden with webinars, emails and technical documentation to help you stay on top of new updates.
Audi, Deloitte, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP), United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR).
- Template-Based Authoring: EdApp allows you to deploy content faster with their system templates. You can either build content from scratch or use one of their many pre-built template modules to deploy content straightaway. There are up to 80 templates to choose from, each offering you numerous ways to systemize and organize content in a sequential manner. These templates come with a pre-defined UI framework but can be customized and branded to personalize learning experience.
The goal of these templates is to give you a foundation to build on to make your content as interactive as possible.
- Template library: If you are a plug-and-play sort of person that does not want to bother much about building course contents from scratch, EdApp has something for you as well. There are over 800 ready-made full-course templates made available in their content library. These courses cover a range of industries including sales, hospitality, and marketing.
- Content Categorization: With EdApp, you can categorize your content into sections instead of lumping them all together under one umbrella. EdApp’s hierarchy content hierarchy is quite simple to understand and it is depicted below:
From the chart, you can see that your content can be categorized into micro lessons, courses, and playlists. Micro lessons are at the very bottom and are created by combining the array of templates made available on the system into a single learning content. Two or more micro lessons make a course and at the very top is the playlist which contains two or more courses. The idea here is to help you organize content and guide users through a sequence of learning materials.
- Customization: As we stated earlier — everything on EdApp is customizable. Besides content customization and editing, you can also edit interface layout. For EdApp, that means every single feature in the platform’s layout from the size of the text boxes to the background theme and color. To emphasize the extent of EdApp’s customization feature you can, get this, specify the sharpness of edges in the layout. This customization depth will be very much appreciated by brands that have shape styles consistent with their identity. You can also brand the entire platform with your logo and proprietary color. This added level of personalization is not common to other learning management systems.
- Live classrooms: Virtual classes is another medium through which you can create learning experience on EdApp. From the platform, you can schedule the meetings for an appointed time and your employees will be notified of this meeting on their mobile devices. You can host live classes via conferencing tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
- Reports and analytics: SafetyCulture’s EdApp provides a couple of reports to help you track user interaction with your lessons and courses. At a quick glance, administrators can view insights on user completion rates, achievement participation, course interaction, and so on. .
- Brain Boost: One EdApp feature we really appreciate is their brain boost program. This program was put together to encourage knowledge retention. It is also a great way to keep users involved in the learning process even days after they’ve concluded courses and micro lessons. This feature helps improve knowledge retention by using the SM-2 algorithm to schedule review sequences based on how easily the information was remembered. Once you set up the brain boost feature, your learners will get daily quizzes for a number of days. The spontaneity of these quizzes would keep users on their toes and the knowledge gained at their fingertips.
- Achievement badges: To make learning even more interesting, you can tie lessons and courses to achievements. With the achievement feature, users are provided several pathways to complete tasks/assignments and earn rewards. Participants can also get rewards and badges for doing simple non-learning-related things like opening the EdApp application, for example, on their mobile devices. This simple incentive goes a long way to drive usage and frequent interaction.
- Multilingual learning: With EdApp, your users can access courses in their native languages. There are two options available to deploy multilingual content — either manually or via AI translation. The AI technology translates lessons to different languages with a 70% accuracy. If you don’t want to use the AI translation, you can record and upload course contents in desired languages. You can then link these course content together for easy access.
- Open API: You can use EdApp’s open API to connect to proprietary systems. You can also connect to payment and ticketing platforms if you want to monetize your content.
Content creation services: EdApp offers content creation services where they take your old powerpoint files and, using their intuitive templates, turn the static PPT slides into an interactive learning material. The first service is completely free and it takes about 2 days to get it all done.
EdApp integrates natively with BambooHR, Zoom, Google Meets, Microsoft Teams, Xero, Zapier, and Degreed. The app also integrates with Slack but not directly. It uses a form of API integration system known as webhooking. This is their detailed documentation on how to connect with slack.
As far as content creation for educational purposes is concerned, EdApp is completely free. But you can get additional features across two paid subscriptions. Here is a breakdown of their price plans:
- Free: The free plan provides an unlimited number of course creation and access to a library of 800+ editable courses. It is also free for an unlimited number of users.
- Growth: This plan costs $1.95 per active user per month. It offers all the benefits of the free plan with the ability to customize the learner’s journey with achievements, review tests, and certifications.
- Plus: The plus plan gives you everything in the two previous plans with advanced features such as full API integration support and AI translation. It costs $2.95 per active user per month.
Note that EdApp offers a 30-day free trial period for all paid plans.
SafetyCulture’s EdApp works best for small-medium sized blue-collar companies as it is a mobile-first platform. Larger global companies can also benefit from its numerous features, such as multilingual content deployment.
- Regular webinars and live demos, especially when new features are released.
- Blogs, technical documentation, and ebooks are made available in their learning centers. You can also access a public library of over 99,000 checklist templates created by EdApp’s customers and staff.
- They have also put together a couple of youtube how-to’s to get you acquainted with the app’s interface.
Prior to founding SafetyCulture, Luke Anear was a private investigator in the workers’ comp sector. During this time he noticed the number of people getting injured for things that could have been prevented if proper safety protocols were in place. This inspired him to start SafetyCulture from his Townsville garage in Queensland Australia. It originally started as a safety training document company and in 2012, they released their proprietary safety checklist app — iAuditor. iAuditor has been tremendously successful over the years. Currently the app is used to complete over 600 million checks a year from companies in 180+ countries.
As the company grew and expanded, they decided to acquire EdApp on September 15, 2020. This was due, in part, to the recent rise in demand for online service tools, largely caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Another reason was purely to extend their reach through the purchase and dominate the eLearning market. EdApp was acquired in a deal that valued the company at $40 million. Their latest acquisition is a lone-worker safety app called SHEQSY.
SafetyCulture has raised over $220 million in nine rounds of funding. Their latest funding was a $50M Series D round raised in May, 2021. The company is currently valued at $2.2 billion, becoming one of only six startups that have hit the unicorn status in Australia.
Company HQ
Townsville, Queensland, Australia
Number of Employees
125 - 500
Year Founded
2004
Amount Raised
$223.2M
