In recent years, educational technology (EdTech) has transformed education. To address the challenges of emerging technology, navigating diverse hardware, learning platforms, and file types, ViewSonic developed the advanced and user-friendly Open Learning Format (OLF). Device-agnostic and future-proof at its core, OLF offers an easy-to-integrate solution that enables teachers to use legacy Interactive Whiteboard content more dynamically and engagingly.
Keep reading to find out about the OLF file format. Or, learn more about digital whiteboards here.
Digital transformation has expanded the teaching methods available to educators, allowing students to become active participants in their learning. Today, the goal is to create an educational environment that promotes peer collaboration, effective communication, and continuous feedback; and provides opportunities to interact with digital resources. This has made interactive learning platforms and digital whiteboards crucial.
As technology constantly evolves, the ease of migration, cross-compatibility, and future-proofing of potential EdTech solutions are critical considerations for all users. As surprising as it may sound, adopting a versatile, harmonized digital whiteboarding file format is the key to answering these challenges.
What is the Open Learning Format (OLF)?
OLF is a powerful solution to replace the outdated digital whiteboard file format. It upgrades the digital whiteboard experience by enabling the seamless import of videos, images, and virtual reality files onto an infinite canvas with multiple page and layer support.
The Benefits of OLF
OLF empowers media-rich, engaging learning experiences across Windows, Android, and Mac (from M1 processor and later) devices and web browsers. This cross-platform compatibility allows educators and students to view, create, edit, and share OLF files on their preferred devices, making OLF an easy-to-adopt solution that encourages seamless collaboration.
With technology becoming increasingly crucial in schools, addressing educators’ needs becomes paramount. Teachers need EdTech solutions that are quick to adopt and compatible with their existing materials. IT admins require flexible options that seamlessly integrate with various devices, operating systems, and network configurations. Additionally, school administrators seek reliable, user-friendly EdTech solutions that can quickly scale to meet their ever-evolving needs. Purpose-built to address these users’ needs, OLF delivers various benefits for schools.
Enhanced Learning Experiences
Interactive learning platforms offer digital whiteboards, virtual classrooms, discussion boards, interactive assessments, and other tools to meet educational needs. These features evolve lessons beyond static content delivery, creating opportunities for personalized learning that nurtures the 21st-century skills of collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and communication.
With an infinite canvas, multimedia support, intuitive zoom, annotation, page, and layer functions, OLF empowers dynamic, engaging, and collaborative educational experiences. Teachers can progress through lessons, delving deeper into content based on their students’ comprehension. In contrast, students can interact, sketch and note-take on the canvas or share media using the myViewBoard Companion app. This non-linear learning contrasts against the rigid structure of outdated file formats, such as slideshow presentations. With traditional file formats, adding annotations or multimedia to presentations during the lesson can be complicated, and sharing the file becomes challenging due to device and platform compatibility issues.
Easy to Adopt and Scale
Interactive learning platform migration is often a big headache for everyone involved. Teachers face a learning curve and compatibility issues with their existing teaching materials. At the same time, IT admins must provide training, technical support and handle file conversion requests following the migration. Meanwhile, school admins must manage the careful planning, implementation, and associated costs of an interactive learning platform migration. Despite the expenses – such as subscriptions, hardware upgrades, software additions, and ongoing maintenance – keeping up to date with technology is essential to meet desired educational outcomes.
OLF’s device-agnostic nature addresses these challenges, providing an easy-to-adopt and scalable alternative to traditional digital whiteboarding formats. It seamlessly integrates into teachers’ workflows, reducing the learning curve and minimizing disruptions and costs. With OLF, teachers can effortlessly import multimedia formats – like .jpg, .mp3, .pdf, or .ppt – and convert legacy digital whiteboard files, enabling them to use their existing teaching materials more dynamically and engagingly. This streamlined process also benefits IT admins, as it reduces compatibility issues and the need for extensive troubleshooting, file conversion, and training requests typically associated with interactive learning platform migration.
To conveniently upgrade .Flipchart (Promethean), .Notebook (SMART) and .ENB (ViewBoard 2.1/EasiNote 3) digital whiteboard files to OLF for free, follow the instructions on the myviewboard.com File Conversion Request page.
Future-proof Solution
While recent EdTech developments – like augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality – are exciting, implementing presents challenges for teachers, IT admins, school administrators, and students. Therefore, future-proofing interactive learning platforms is vital to meet evolving educational needs.
The OLF integration with UNIVERSE by ViewSonic demonstrates how a simple file format can empower new teaching formats. Teachers can create and import .OLF files on digital whiteboards around the 3D environment within this virtual platform. These files can be saved to the cloud, providing students with an enhanced distance learning experience.
Strengthens the Educating Team
Effortless to share and edit, the school-wide adoption of OLF offers new possibilities for teacher collaboration, fostering openness and sharing of lesson plans, presentations, quizzes, games, and more among teachers and schools. This benefits school admins in the knowledge that teachers are creating an evergreen bank of accurate, high-quality educational content that delivers the desired learning outcomes to students.
OLF helps create impactful learning experiences that drive student engagement and understanding by facilitating an open flow of resources and peer review. Online teaching communities expand this information flow even further. With the ViewSonic Educator Community, teachers can access and remix a wealth of community-generated and purchasable OLF learning materials. Teachers can also use ViewSonic Originals, which is an extensive interactive media collection made in OLF for digital whiteboards.
Final Thoughts
In summary, OLF empowers educators, IT admins, and school administrators with a device-agnostic solution that overcomes the limitations of traditional digital whiteboarding file formats. With advanced tools and file conversion support for legacy whiteboarding formats, OLF allows educators to enhance their lessons. Moreover, cross-platform compatibility ensures seamless migration from outdated digital whiteboarding systems while freeing IT admins and school administrators from restrictions to a single EdTech brand’s hardware and software ecosystem. This newfound freedom streamlines administrative tasks and reduces costs associated with future interactive learning platform updates, providing a future-proof solution.
Are you looking to make the most of this new standard for digital whiteboarding? Continue to the OLF webpage to learn more. Alternatively, learn how to build an impactful education ecosystem with myViewBoard.
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