UST is poised to boost learning and bring its community even closer together through the use of its new, powerful, yet simple video platform called YuJa. Faculty, staff and students will enjoy the user-friendly YuJa’s features and benefits as they create and use video.

On a purely practical side, the platform provides secure storage for online videos, cutting down on the amount of storage that UST uses in its learning management system, Blackboard. But that is only the beginning.

Helping Faculty to Keep Students Engaged

UST’s AVP of Academic Affairs Jim Monaghan said, “YuJa gives faculty the means to provide secure, active connections with their students via short, 5 to 10-minute lessons, welcome messages and more. In addition, faculty can create knowledge check quizzes for their videos, encouraging students to focus more on the videos. On top of that, faculty can create video assignments and discussions, edit their videos, upload videos from outside sources and easily caption the videos in their courses.”

Great Video Tools that Faculty, Staff & Students Will Appreciate

Happily, YuJa comes with many tools that the previous video system did not have.

“Video quizzes and video assignments, discussions and tests are awesome tools to engage students with their learning and help to build learning communities,” said Darrin Jones, senior instructional designer.

Jones and Tara Kissel, from Ellucian, spearheaded the selection process for a new video platform at UST. They worked with a faculty committee to determine that YuJa was the best choice

According to Jones, video discussions give students a chance to see their classmates and help them to interact with each other. Short, focused videos created by faculty allow students to engage more fully with their learning. But tools like YuJa are only truly valuable when they are used.

Training Support, Just Ask

Monaghan said, “YuJa can be a game-changer for learning and community building, and I urge faculty and staff to embrace it and take advantage of our training support.”

Faculty and staff can get help with setup plus advice on best practices for using YuJa’s useful tools by contacting teachonline@stthom.edu. Group training is also available upon request. In addition, YuJa provides a help center with video tutorials, quick start guides and other helpful information at https://support.yuja.com/hc/en-us.