Learning Management Systems create a platform for online engagement and student instruction; with this change in the way, teachers and students access and interact with their classrooms with the reach of education being larger than ever. As adoption and adaptation of LMS systems continue to grow within learning organizations, teachers and instructional designers play an important role in the education ecosystem.
Atomic Jolt creates software that supports creating and delivering effective instruction by aligning learning outcomes, assessments, and learning events. They build tools that empower instructional designers and teachers to quickly develop and deliver effective instruction for students to gain understanding and competency.
Diffusing technology and education homogeneously
Joel Duffin, CEO and Justin Ball, CTO, both have worked in software for more than twenty years. They met while doing graduate work in Instructional Technology at Utah State University. In addition to their combined passion in building software, they were both obsessed with understanding how people learn and how to use technology to support teaching and learning. After finishing his Ph.D., about 10 years ago, Joel started a company along with Justin and started contracting with Universities and EdTech companies. In 2013, they officially incorporated Atomic Jolt.
Education’s motto is to learn efficiently wherever, whenever
In the last ten years, technology has changed the way we work and communicate with others — and it’s also changed how we interact in the classroom. In fact, some educators argue that technology can improve the classroom by eliminating the need for a physical one, and allow students to learn remotely, from wherever they do their best work. While it’s still too early to know if this is the most effective way to teach, it’s important to stay up-to-date on these innovations in education and see what we can learn from them. Atomic Jolt helps to build a platform that could provide faculty curation of content and support their unique business model.
Get preference with salient services
Atomic Jolt’s mission is to deliver software solutions that make teaching and learning more efficient and enjoyable. Atomic Jolt is an important player in the Learning Management Systems industry- they deliver custom development, LMS hosting, and valuable SaaS products that improve upon the functionality of an out of the box system. They create positive user experiences by keeping the solutions focused, simple, and powerful, which affects student motivation. When a student is motivated to learn, you can’t stop them from learning. When they are not, you can’t make them learn.
Striking approach that dissolves challenges
About two years ago Atomic Jolt formalized a partnership with the Canvas LMS company, Instructure, one of the fastest growing LMSs in higher education in the United States. As a partner, Instructure may send customers to Atomic Jolt for customizations and often contracts with them for specific projects. Atomic Jolt has created many integrations, customizations, and extensions for Canvas through this partnership.
Atomic Jolt’s partnership with Instructure has resulted in receiving a number of new contracts including their largest ever which is a 4 year government sub-contract to implement and support the open source Canvas LMS for Air University, the Air Force center for professional military education.
Air University required a self-hosted version of Canvas with significant customization and Atomic Jolt was the leading company to do that. As part of the project, Atomic Jolt brought up the Canvas LMS for Air University, helped choose third party integrations, built plugins and add-ons to customize Canvas.
Values that Atomic Jolt follows
Historically, Atomic Jolt’s main line of business has been contract work for EdTech companies and Universities to build custom web and mobile applications. Because of their strong background in education, much of their focus has been in that industry, but they have also built applications for a variety of other industries including healthcare, shipping, e-commerce, and marketing. When Atomic Jolt works with clients to develop custom applications, they use agile processes that emphasizes on continual engagement with the client throughout the lifetime of the project.
Looking forward at content management
As Atomic Jolt works closely with LMSs and with companies building tools that integrate with them, they’ve had the opportunity to observe the needs of teachers and learners. They’ve also been able to identify the gaps in functionality in LMSs. This year they are focusing on SaaS products that improve and extend functionality of LMSs. For example, Atomic Jolt provides an add-on that makes it possible to search your content in the Canvas LMS-something you otherwise can’t do. They also have a content management system that lets publishers and schools share and reuse their content, in and outside of their LMS.