About the company

I am Cosmin, I am the CEO of ASCENDIA, the company responsible for developing LIVRESQ and, from time to time I’ll write in this blog to let you all know our plans for the tool, our successes or failures and basically to give you a pulse of what we’re doing. I hope you’ll enjoy reading and enjoy our tools.

As a short background, ASCENDIA was funded in 2007 and since we’ve been developing educational software exclusively – platforms & content. We are based in Bucharest, Romania and since 2016 we are listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange under the ASC symbol.

The company has a portal with elearning modules for kids: www.dacobots.com, a speech therapy platform (only for Romanian language) www.timlogo.ro, a Learning Management System for companies www.coffeelms.com and this very tool for online content creation www.livresq.com.

If you are an investor or can be a strategic partner (eLearning company – LMS, content etc), do drop us a line at office@ascendia.ro! We are still in the need for fuel to grow so we search for strategic partners and investors.

History  – how come we made this eLearning authoring tool?

LIVRESQ started from the idea that publishers should be able to make digital interactive textbooks, very easy, without the need to use programmers to remake the content from printed books into digital responsive HTML5 format, than to pay services to augment it with multimedia. We wanted to streamline this process. So we made it easy to import Fixed EPUB files into LIVRESQ, published from Adobe InDesign (.indd) files, the publishers have when developing the books for print. And once imported, they are automatically made responsive and easily to augment by a what you see is what you get simple interface. We constructed it based on our company’s experience developing printed and digital textbooks for the national ministry of education.

After that we realized that, in fact the teachers are those who will use those textbooks and in general they make all sorts of presentations for their kids (those who embrace technology’s benefits). Are you among them? 😊 If so, it worth reading forward. So, we said, what if we make this tool able to provide the teachers what they are lacking – a solution in which they can put text, videos, pictures, quizzes etc., without the need to know programing and with the possibility to make that content available for their kids both online and offline, in a responsive interface that can work on PC, tablets and phones – where the kids are. And what if we give them this tool for free?

And finally, last, but not least, as our company ASCENDIA develops interactive eLearning modules for companies, we said: what if we empower LIVRESQ with attributes specific to the corporate and academic learning systems : make the publish content available also in SCORM format, put systems for tracking and correct reporting of the time, score, experience of the user and so on, in-bricked in the published materials. And so we did! So the tool became also useful for us and for any company or team out there that produces adult eLearning modules.

About the LIVRESQ Suite

We saw this solution as a mix of 3 systems: the LIVRESQ Author, the Library and the Content Shop.

The most important is the Author – the tool that give the users the possibility to create and download the eLearning presentation. You can experiment it here, for free if you are a teacher or with a 60 days trial otherwise.

Aside this, we thought that the content authors (publishers, teachers, freelancers etc) would like to publish somewhere what they produced, this being the function of the Library. And we keep the Library access free for all.  Here, for now you can only publish for all to see after we accept the published material, but, in the future, we plan to give people the possibility to publish private (to a list of people who can see it). Also for the future we plan to give the authors the option to publish a payed version of their content, so only the users paying in the platform to have access to that material will be able to see the content, thus giving the publishers a stream of income.

Ant the third part of the solution it will be a Content Shop. This will host both free as well as licensed (commercial) content, the authors will be able to use in their materials. Can be pictures, audios, videos, interactive 3DS and more.

The plan is these developments to be carried out in 2020.

For partially developing the suite we used European Funding, through a national line, that enabled us to plan and develop the LIVRESQ Author and a part of the Library over a 2 year period of time. The EU funding finished in August 2019 and since we operate on our company’s funding. For the future developments we use commercial funding and we search for a partner/investor to push the development and the solution’s adoption worldwide.

So, there are three big categories of users of the LIVRESQ eLearning Suite:

•  Book publishers of whatever industry, who want to easily produce online responsive content;

•  Teachers, who want a tool to integrate all their teaching materials for the class and want to publish it either to their school LMS, or online or offline for use from an usb stick;

• eLearning professionals – companies or freelancers of the industry, who develop eLearning modules for various Learning Management Systems.

Overall, we plan to keep the suite simple, yet powerful, this being so far the biggest challenge we encountered while developing the Author and a part of the Library functionalities.

Our latest release 14.02.2020 and what’s next

So, about every two weeks we make a new release of the platform. From release to release we fix issues and make improvements.

Our latest release was on 14.02.2020. In this release, the major updates to LIVRESQ Author were:

• we added the option for the user to easily create Tabs of content;

• we implemented the interface in Chinese, Portuguese, Korean and Arabic, aside the existing English and Romanian;

• we fixed some issues, the most important being related to SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 3’rd edition publishing.

A short peek in the next releases:

• The localization of the LIVRESQ Author’s interface in more languages – German, French and Greek are already underway;

• The possibility to have open questions and survey questions in your eLearning content is also underway;

• Improvements (extensions) to the sharing mechanism of both the Author (for collaborative work) as well as for the Library (for easy sharing to third parties);

• Avatars 😊 – you’ll be able to use avatars to guide your reader experience with text and voice.

Developing the LIVRESQ Suite is one of the major achievements of our team. We are proud of the product and we invite you to test it. We’re sure that once you give it a try you’ll love it! And what’s not to love: is simple and extremely practical!

More updates to come soon!