PanOpen

PanOpen

PanOpen is a Kaplan TechStars New York startup that provides a platform for universities to adopt and deliver open licensed textbooks and faculty-created materials. panOpen not only makes it easy to adopt open licensed books, but also provides aligned assessments, learning analytics, and personalization tools.

Problem

A major barrier to student completion of university degrees is the cost, with textbooks playing a significant role. panOpen helps organizations reduce that cost by adopting open licensed textbooks. For over a decade, foundations and government organizations have funded the development of open licensed textbooks and other learning materials. Despite the large investment in developing open content, to this day it has not been widely adopted in university instruction. Part of this is because of the lack of technological support for adopting open content. panOpen came to Atomic Jolt for help to build a platform that could provide faculty curation of content and support their unique business model.

Solution

Atomic Jolt worked closely with panOpen to make technology decisions, implement and iterate user interface and experience, and to build out their platform. We started quickly by integrating with and augmenting Google docs as an authoring platform. We helped add analytics dashboards, quizzes, and library functionality. Most recently, we also collaborated with panOpen to roll out a new student learning experience.

BOTTOM LINE: A growing number of high profile organizations are adopting panOpen, reducing the cost of textbooks. Instructors can easily adopt a large number of existing open licensed textbooks and quickly adapt them for use in their courses. Students can use panOpen mobile to easily access and annotate class content and instructors can easily view student scores and other learning analytics using panOpen's dashboards.