Pearson Education to use Sylva learning platform

Sylva is a spin-off from the University of Zurich (UZH), which is developing an innovative learning and assessment platform. This allows lecturers to create courses and set exams in addition to assessing and administrating them by way of an automated process.

In contrast to the majority of other learning platforms, Sylva offers the possibility of creating various types of tasks, open-ended questions and interactive exercises, as detailed by UZH in a press release. This is particularly important for academic subjects such as statistics, mathematics and economics, in which formulas and modelling are used.

In addition to the creation of complex tasks, Sylva facilitates automated exam assessments and saves time for course instructors. The platform also offers self-testing to students. Thanks to a function known as automated parameterization, teaching staff can even create different versions of the same question. In this way, students are able to complete ever-varying exercises as part of the self-tests, which helps to accelerate the learning process.

Sylva has now also been able to convince Pearson Education of the benefits offered by its platform, as the press release reveals. According to information from UZH, Pearson Education is the world’s largest publisher of school and university textbooks. From this fall on, it will use the technology developed by Sylva for math problems on its own learning platform. Apart from that, the platform is also being used in several business schools across the USA, the UK, Greece and Germany.