Avallain: Pioneering Digital Education

Ignatz Heinz, Co-Founder & MD

Ignatz Heinz wrote his first training software in 1984 while he was still in high school. The potential of technology in transforming learning processes never stopped fascinating him. This very fascination led him to found a global digital education enterprise, Avallain, in 2002, together with Ursula Suter, a Swiss education specialist. Their offbeat ideas about the integration of technology and education resulted in the development of an online authoring tool and a Learning Content Management System (LCMS) even before the terms became widely recognized. Over the years the company has kept its pace with the evolution of the education landscape, gradually becoming the premier solution for leading education publishers of today. Simply put, Avallain’s products offer some of the deepest and most comprehensive functionalities available for the intricate workflow needs and diverse content offerings of international educational publishing.

The company’s authoring tool, Avallain Author, is a flexible e-learning application that uses an object-oriented approach for learning methods. It enables editors and teachers to design, author, and efficiently produce interactive educational products. Pure HTML5 technology delivers content cleanly stored in XML to all devices and platforms. Promoting educational design over technology hype, Avallain Author production processes and workflows provide a highly flexible and robust solution for an institution’s educational content.

Avallain Unity, the firm’s other core e-learning application delivers flexible learning for all contexts, based on a union of the best technologies in digital education. It is an individualized learning platform architecture which can be quickly adapted to the needs of any user, from large publishing companies creating learning platforms for primary and secondary schools to individual educational institutions or corporate education programs.

To enhance the learning engagements further, Avallain Author and Avallain Unity come with gamification capabilities.

We are experts in education technology and digital publishing and have the tools and processes to achieve the positive impact on human potential that technology enhanced education can provide

Using Avallain, authors can include game elements such as points, levels or time limits to suit their educational objectives.

All these capabilities place Avallain Author and Avallain Unity in a unique position with the popular education digital solution and service providers in the market such as Kerboodle, an online teaching, learning, and assessment brand owned by Oxford University Press. Avallain Author and Avallain Unity make it easy for Kerboodle to work alongside course textbooks to create a truly blended learning solution. Teachers are supported too by enhanced data collection and analysis, which allow them to monitor their students' progress and develop personalized learning journeys. Kerboodle already has active users in the millions.

To cite another success story, Avallain Author has been deployed by Pearson, one of the leading learning companies that provide learning materials, technologies, assessments and services to teachers and students. The client leveraged Avallain Author to prepare a new wave of learning resources for their Poptropica English, a vibrant blended learning program based on the popular online children game Poptropica. The game's characters, narratives, and settings are used throughout Poptropica English to achieve new heights of engagement and motivation. The seamlessly-integrated learning resources from Avallain Author encourage students to practice and develop their language skills and support them in their learning. The result is a truly child-centered experience, driven by the individual’s excitement, interest, and pace of learning.

This approach is rooted deep within Avallain’s business philosophy. The company’s logo, the Chinese character for “human”, reflects its dedication to using technology for the benefit of human beings. Notably, Avallain not only designs software to provide individual learning experiences, but also actively supports projects such as the Frankfurt Book Fair Literacy Campaign. Furthermore, part of the company’s revenue flows directly to the U.S.-based Avallain Foundation, supporting its charitable work in Kenya.