Certica Solutions Announces AB Connect Professional Edition

Certica Solutions (Certica), provider of the Certica Connect™ edtech platform-as-a-service (PaaS), today announced the general availability of AB Connect™ Professional Edition which bundles capabilities from the Academic Benchmarks™ and Artifact® systems and taxonomies. AB Connect is Certica’s tagging, search and discovery system which promotes education content interoperability and searchability in websites, applications and platforms. AB Connect features more than 4 million learning standards and connected search terms with a powerful artificial intelligence (AI)-based engine which provides machine assistance to make the content tagging and alignment process highly efficient and accurate.

The AB Connect Professional Edition enables publishers and curators of instructional and assessment content to tag their learning assets with expertly-chosen search terms, organized into taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, allowing publishers’ content to be searched, discovered, recommended and connected to other learning assets. The machine-assisted accuracy of AB Connect has been measured by Certica clients to be over 92% on a machine-only basis and as high as 99.98% with modest subject matter expert (SME) involvement; machine-assisted alignments are executed up to four times faster than straight manual alignment. AB Connect’s educational search terms and learning standards can be tagged to any type of learning asset, including lessons, passages, articles, videos, test questions and books.

The AB Connect Professional Edition also allows technology providers to enable content search and discovery in their websites, applications and platforms, and integrate multiple types and sources of content, including open educational resources (OER). AB Connect Professional Edition is used by a range of edtech providers, including Glynlyon® Odysseyware®, American Federation of Teachers, Nearpod® and McGraw-Hill Education®.

AB Connect builds upon the original Academic Benchmarks repository of machine-readable standards and unique standards identifier – known as the AB GUID. More than 200 edtech providers have used the Academic Benchmarks learning standards and AB GUID to interoperate with content partners and deliver relevant learning assets to educators and students since 2006. Beginning in 2014, Academic Benchmarks, which was acquired by Certica in 2016, expanded its tagging and alignment system to enable capabilities via API, and developed powerful machine-assisted tagging of learning content – beyond standards alignments. In 2017, Certica acquired the Artifact content tagging system and taxonomy, designed to enable book search and discovery.

The AB Connect Professional Edition bundle includes the following capabilities via user interface and/or API:

Said Mark Rankovic, Certica president and CEO, “as educators strive to personalize each student’s learning experience, the demand on content providers for relevant, real-time learning content grows. We’ve seen tremendous success across our client ecosystem, with content publishers, curators and edtech providers utilizing the AB Connect system for content tagging, search and discovery. The level of efficiency and accuracy is allowing our clients to enhance their products and market reach, and provide a better experience for teachers and students. We’re pleased to offer this new bundle of capabilities in the AB Connect Professional Edition, giving providers a significant boost in their ability to expand their businesses and meet market needs.”

• Content Tagging and Alignment System, including a powerful AI-based Recommendation Engine
• Taxonomies and Controlled Vocabularies, including Concepts, Topics and Key Ideas; as well as the Artifact Taxonomy for specialized Tagging, Search & Discovery of Book Titles
• Repository of more than 4 Million Learning Standards and Unique Identifiers, the AB GUIDs, for 50 States plus D.C., and both Core-4 and Non-Core Subjects
• Embeddable Search, Discovery & Recommendation
• Embeddable UI-based Learning Standards Browser
• Change Management and Coverage Reports