I’ve covered QuirkLogic’s Quilla solution several times at InfoComm expos over the years, but was delighted to see their product now being officially fronted for the education vertical. QuirkLogic has begun featuring their Quilla product at a number of educational conferences as of late, most recently at EduCause, the higher-ed conference held in Denver last month.
Quilla describes itself as “the world’s largest ePaper display (42” diagonal)”, a low-power-consuming display that “enables teams with multiple locations or remote workers to create and collaborate” using digital ink. In the past, Quilla’s “real-time ideation solution” was aimed chiefly at the enterprise customer. To attract the education market, however, they have ‘reframed’ their product nicely. That’s a smart thing to do when trying to entreat the education market, because using the right lingo matters within education circles.
For education customers, QuirkLogic designates Quilla as a “large format portable writing device.” To further invite educators’ interest, they also highlight the notion that Quilla is surrounded by an ecosystem to help them collaborate and share ideas, while providing an “intuitive writing experience.”
To reach education customers, QuirkLogic has smartly emphasized key use cases for deploying Quilla in education settings:
- Active learning classrooms
- Informal learning spaces
- Connective learning environments
- Special events and conferences
- IT collaboration/war rooms
- Board rooms
I should slow down and talk a little about “active learning classrooms” at this point. The “active learning classroom” is a term that every company interested in selling to higher ed must understand. Now trending in higher education improvement conversations, the “active learning classroom” denotes an interlocking mix of new learning space designs, new technologies, new furniture designs and creative/collaborative teaching pedagogies. Basically, it’s the new description used in higher-ed for the most desirable learning environment and ed market companies will want to hitch their products to that star. QuirkLogic is smart to do so.
The newest features of Quilla are also designed to entice educators, some of which support this trending philosophy of the “active learning classroom”. Quilla now:
- hosts all data in the cloud
- permits export of display annotations/assignments to PDF or a university LMS from the Quilla App
- permits cross-sharing work done on the app to a large display or projector
- is mobile and untethered (see picture below)
Enabling classroom flexibility, Quilla is now movable (notice the wheels at bottom) and wireless.
At first blush, Quilla isn’t likely to dethrone large displays and projectors from every university and K-12 classroom wall. Their most advantaged opening is to try to sell into the other situational segments, such as those highlighted in the above use cases. There is also great potential for Quilla in university conference rooms, meeting rooms, and the online synchronous “distance learning” classrooms that pepper rural educational markets. Most importantly, their brave push to fashion a product for the trending “active learning” classroom is a bold move. During my interview, I discovered that Quilla is already positioned in five universities, even as outreach to QuirkLogic’s legacy educational clients grows. They are notably working on refining the pedagogy (teaching strategies) that will leverage Quilla effectively in these next-generation learning spaces. –Len Scrogan
