How Impelsys is changing the game in delivering impactful, engaging, and adaptable online learning solutions

Digital transformation may have become the buzzword today, more so after the pandemic, but there are a few pioneers in this journey who have revolutionised industry verticals with their services. One such name is Impelsys, which has been around for more than two decades, and has 1,000+ experts and over 2,500 tailor-made solutions.

Bengaluru-based Impelsys extends its services to some of the largest brands to build world-class products and provide learning solutions. What’s more, Impelsys is a global market leader in delivering impactful, engaging, and adaptable online learning solutions for content creators, education providers, and enterprises, like LexisNexis, Pearson, American Heart Association, and American Diabetes Association, as well as Viacom 18, among others.

“Impelsys initially started with a few projects in digital publishing. Around 2010, we thought of productising our immense experience and came up with ‘iPublishCentral’ — our first platform that helped publishers modernise their content and publish the same,” shares Sameer Shariff, Founder, Impelsys, adding that about four years ago, they aggregated all their learnings in digital publishing and online learning into a single SaaS-based platform Scholar 2.0 platform.

These innovative offerings led Impelsys to earn a top place at the AWS ISV Innovation Cup. The intensive challenge is for independent software vendors (ISVs) to build an innovative solution that meets their everyday customer needs, with technical support from AWS. As part of the challenge, participating ISVs had to define a real-world customer requirement or identify a product improvement area in their current offerings and propose an innovative solution that also leveraged AWS Machine Learning (ML) services.

Revolutionising digital learning

Impelsys has over two decades of experience in building digital products and online solutions integrations into existing ecosystems and infrastructure. By leveraging their technical expertise and deep domain knowledge, they deliver and manage next-generation, future-ready applications to help customers in meeting their strategic priorities.

Their multi-tenant SaaS-based platform provides all tools and work processes to help edtech companies, publishers, and societies and associations to launch and monetise their digital learning assets in the virtual learning world. Impelsys has a centre of excellence to leverage their technical expertise in the form of practices that their customers benefit from.

“As a part of the celebration of 20 years of success, we launched Scholar 3.0, an AI-driven intelligent platform that harnesses the power of disruptive technologies to offer cutting-edge solutions in edtech and digital publishing. Today, Impelsys as a company has over 14,000 person-years of experience in developing digital solutions in edtech, more than 250 customers, and 35 million end-users,” says Shariff, adding that their goal for 2022-23 is to launch an ‘Adaptive Learning System’ that anchors on the AI/ML technology to individualise e-learning.

Leveraging the power of the cloud

Impelsys’ core platform Scholar 3.0 is hosted on AWS. The multi-tenant cloud-based platform provides all tools and workflows in edtech to enable their customers to not only launch their businesses but also monetise them.

“Being on the cloud has allowed us to offer flexibility to the customers in terms of selecting their business models, and localising their solution for their audience. As a facilitator for e-learning solutions, it is imperative that all learning content of the platform be accessed through smartphones and desktops alike,” says Shariff.

They have been able to harness the power of the cloud to provide mobility to their clients, which could otherwise be a deal-breaker for many customers. Further, they have also been able to expand offerings to a wider set of customers with a flexible pricing structure – a set of base features for SMEs and advanced features for large companies.

Success stories

Impelsys has enabled digital transformation for American Heart Association (AHA) by successfully deploying a blended learning model that leverages both hybrid and hands-on learning delivery. They also developed internal capabilities to support AHA’s needs on analytics solutions, cloud operations, e-commerce solutions, simulations, and other specialised learning delivery.

Impelsys has also developed a learning delivery infrastructure for the American Society of Clinical Oncology. There was a need for complex integration requirements with third party systems — SSO, CRM, e-commerce, and continuing education providers.

Further, Impelsys developed enterprise-grade applications for a leading global STM publisher such as Enterprise Asset Repository and Enterprise Assessment Engine.

“As a part of the IPC product offering, we provide multiple AI/ML services like iQ, SumItUp, Metadata tagger, adaptive engine, recommendation engine, etc. The IPC scholar platform uses these services to enhance user experience, productivity, and enables personalised offerings. These services can be consumed by clients independently,” shares Shariff.

iQ service is used to generate questions on the go, which saves time for teachers and also helps students to create questions and quizzes on the go (enrich q banks). Metadata tagger service increases the discoverability of content by adding useful metadata to the content. On the other hand, SumItUp helps users/students to generate notes, flashcards, and summaries on the go. Last but not the least, the adaptive engine is a key component of an adaptive learning system that identifies and understands learners' skills and provides the best learning path.

Way forward

Participating in the AWS ISV Innovation Cup was a great learning experience for Team Impelsys, says Mahesh Chikodi, Vice President - Digital Engineering, Impelsys.

“The structure provided for the product pitch was very well-designed and it was very helpful in condensing our thoughts in a structured way. The opportunity allowed us to stretch our limits to ideate a solution that would really be useful to the world of online assessment at large. During the process, we became further aware of the AWS ecosystem that has all the tools and support to help companies like us realise our product vision,” he added.

Impelsys envisions leveraging its strategic partnership with AWS by being an ISV Accelerate Partner, where they can join forces to offer solutions to take it to the global market.