SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Kno, Inc., www.kno.com, a leader in education software, announced Advance, an Interactive Learning Platform that enables publishers and authors to turn a flat file or PDF into an interactive eBook in minutes at no cost. Because grades are a lagging indicator of learning success and engagement is a leading indicator, Kno is dedicated to make learning more engaging for students. The Advance platform was created to provide publishers with powerful, yet easy-to-use tools, to make their content and assessments interactive and engaging at scale with no added costs.
“Advance is a bold step into the future of publishing, where publishers and authors can instantly enhance and update their content. For example, when Pluto loses its status as a planet, publishers can instantly modify a 3D model of the solar system in their science books,” said Osman Rashid, CEO and Co-Founder of Kno Inc. “Advance is ushering in a new paradigm in which mainstream titles will be revised and enhanced frequently - more like software.”
The Advance platform consists of Kno Ingest, the Kno Book Enhancer, and Kno Assessment. With Kno Ingest, publishers can submit a flat file and Kno will transform it into an interactive eBook with dozens of features in minutes. This seamless on-boarding process brings content and meta-content to life and can bring hundreds of thousands of titles to market within days.
With the Kno Book Enhancer, a publisher can update or enhance an eBook with a new interactive element in less than a minute. Using simple tools, editors and even authors can add videos, audio, websites, 3D objects, calculators or simulations to their books. With Advance, they can add a new interactive element when news happens or new research is available, then instantly push that new element to all users of their digital book worldwide. With digital going mainstream, publishers can finally break-free from the slow and costly print publishing cycles. Updating long-tail titles with interactive content and assessments is no longer cost prohibitive.
Publishing partners who have had early access to the tools are enthusiastic about the new capabilities Kno Advance delivers.
“Working with Kno, the process of converting our print titles to highly interactive eBooks has been seamless,” said Kurt Strand, Chief Product Officer, McGraw Hill Higher Education. “Now, using Kno’s Book Enhancer, we are able to enhance or update our eBooks virtually instantly. The process of defining interactivity is literally the same as creating it with Kno.”
“Using Kno’s Book Enhancer gives us better digital tools and capabilities than many large publishing houses,” said Greg Greul, President of Wayside Publishing. “The ease of use, speed, and lack of additional costs enables us to keep our AP programs for English, History, and World Language programs compelling and up to date for students.”
Another tool in the Advance platform is Kno Assessment, which allows publishers to quickly and easily make the static end of chapter exercises and assignments in their books interactive. And the outcome (i.e. grades) for these assessments is captured and made available to students to see in their Kno Me dashboards. Kno Assessment includes the ability for publishers to author questions and assessments in a browser session, or import existing questions from their current systems. Kno supports multiple types of questions and each question can support student feedback like hints and remediation. Even more powerfully, publishers can easily sprinkle questions throughout their books providing immediate feedback to students at the moment they need it most.
Kno works with more than 80 publishers and offers over 200,000 interactive textbooks for K-12 and higher education students. Kno is available for iPad, Android, Windows 7 & 8 and the browser. And, through its partnership with DonorsChoose.org, Kno donates $1 for every book purchase at Kno.com.
For more information about the Advance publishing platform, please visit: www.kno.com/advance-publishers.
About KNO
Kno, Inc. is an education software company on a mission to make learning engaging, effective, and social for students. Osman Rashid, the co-founder of Chegg, and Babur Habib, a consumer electronics veteran, founded Kno, Inc. in May 2009. The company has received funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Intel Capital, Goldman Sachs, FLOODGATE and GSV Capital and is based in Santa Clara, California. For more information, go to www.kno.com, or follow Kno at http://facebook.com/GoodtoKno and http://twitter.com/GoodtoKNO.