NoCo education tech company debuts video platform

LOVELAND — YouSeeU, a Loveland education tech company, is unveiling its new video platform for developing soft skills in students at SXSW in Austin on Tuesday.

The platform, called Bongo, has been more than a year in the making and is designed to help educators teach and test soft skills like communication, language proficiency, bedside manner and others by allowing students to record video or use live video in practical situations.

To create Bongo, YouSeeU hired graduate students and asked them to physically draw out what their ideal user interface for an educational platform. Senior staff then partnered with the students to bring their vision to life, CEO Jay Doktor told BizWest.

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The result is an easy-to-use video platform that allows students to respond to a prompt given by a teacher, which gives a better assessment of their understanding than writing an essay or answering multiple choice questions. YouSeeU developed a mobile platform first, so it can be more easily adopted by the on-the-go students using it.

“It’s been found over and over again there is a deeper understanding of what students understand when you make them speak about it,” said Margaret Amisano, director of marketing for YouSeeU. “Through our video assessment solution, users can build critical soft skills. There’s a huge gap in critical thinking, which has led to a talent shortage.”

There are many disciplines that can use Bongo to test and grow those critical soft skills, such as foreign language teachers using it to test language proficiency, corporate teams to use it to test sales skills and health care educators testing bedside manner and the ability to share medical information with a patient.

“One of my favorite examples is juggling,” Doktor said. “People can describe it, but then it’s different when you ask someone to demonstrate how to juggle. There’s knowledge and there’s skill. We’re capturing that skill or performance, and then allow for self-reflection, peer-to-peer feedback or instructors giving coaching feedback. That’s our core.”

YouSeeU started back in 2009, when founder Jeff Lewis, a professor at Metropolitan State and Colorado State University’s online program was looking for a better way to see students demonstrate their communication skills than using video tapes or flash drives. Nearly 10 years ago, he started working on a programming solution, which created YouSeeU and eventually the new Bongo platform.

Now, as innovators themselves, YouSeeU has decided to debut Bongo at one of the nation’s biggest innovation events, SXSW.

“It’s a hub for innovation,” Amisano said. “You see a lot of new revolutionary ideas unveiled here, especially in the education tech sector. We’re excited to be with like-minded innovators and forward-thinkers. It’s a highly regarded conference and we wanted to make a big splash here.”

Looking ahead, YouSeeU plans to continue to partner with education institutions and corporate groups. It’s already partnered with CSU and University of Phoenix, among other educational systems, and it’s being integrated into other educational channels.

“We’re covering the gamut, providing this service through several different means is our go-to-market strategy,” Doktor said. “We expect to grow to millions of users.”

The Northern Colorado company, while proud to be local, is also proud to have international reach, with students in Australia, China and Germany using its platform.

“We’ve demonstrated a diversified, collaborate learning process worldwide,” Doktor said. “We’re a company in Northern Colorado with a pretty large reach and we expect that reach to grow and impact learning and soft skill development for all individuals.”