Customer story: New Directions for Academic Advancement

How NDA2 Provides Digital Textbooks to their Teachers Worldwide

New Directions for Academic Advancement (NDA2) uses literacy and character development as the foundation for children’s excellence. NDA2 was established in 2001 by Linda Gonzales, PhD., as a nonprofit to serve education. Since then, the organization has helped failing schools in the US succeed, and opened branches and tutoring centers across China and South America, where they are shaking the industry with their unique ESL methodology.

Challenge

NDA2 had to provide their teachers in China and South America with book copies, but shipping them to professionals around the world would’ve been costly and time-consuming. The organization needed a faster and more efficient way to send information to their employees. It had to be secure, too, because each textbook contains invaluable intellectual property.

Because of the expansion of the school we needed to get digital content to our teachers quickly instead of printing and shipping physical books. It costs a lot, and dealing with customs takes a long time.

Search for solution

The tool NDA2 was looking for had to be streamline, easy to use and understand. It was also important for them to be able to test out the product, see how it worked and how simple it was to create a publication. Protecting their digital textbooks from unwanted viewers was another issue they wanted to solve. NDA2 looked into several products before finding a tool that suited their needs best.

We looked at Kotobee, Online Book Builder and a few others. They all had different features that you could use to create an ebook. FlippingBook was the least complicated by far. It was also the most intuitive and efficient as far as the process of creating publications goes.

Solution

With FlippingBook Online, NDA2 doesn’t have to worry about shipping times and costs anymore. The organization shares publications with the teachers via a private network, where they can safely view each book and the curriculum. Plus, the ability to disable SEO indexing also helps NDA2 to keep their textbooks private. This way, the organization knows that the intellectual property won’t be used by other schools without their permission. And the teachers at their school branches love the new format.

The feedback has been very positive so far about the look of the publications, their quality, and the ease of use. To be able to use the cloud system, access the data, and be able to look at the books has been very helpful for our teachers internationally.

To make sure that the textbooks are being appreciated and viewed, NDA2 uses the lead capture form, built in the software. They ask each teacher to submit their full name and email address when opening a publication for the first time. This allows NDA2 to learn who exactly views their curriculum and how often.

Generally, I ask all the teachers to put in their first name, last name and email address within a FlippingBook publication. That way, every time they’re viewing the document, I see a notification. It helps me know how frequently the books are being viewed.

Results

All of the teachers at NDA2 can now access their educational materials fast on any device, no matter where in the world they are. What they value is that the digital copy looks exactly the same as the printed one, which gives the teachers comfort and confidence in the textbooks they use.

The benefit for us is that we can upload a document that we have in print and make it look exactly the same online. FlippingBook offers the hard cover option, and you can flip the pages and hear a sound effect. It all has a kind of neat look to it.

With three kindergarten and four primary school levels in the NDA2 curriculum, 28 textbooks and other educational materials, such as flashcards and posters, have been developed. 30 more are scheduled to be published in 2018. All of these publications are available on FlippingBook: teachers can pull them up to show on large screens during class, and students can review them at home using their online portal.

Using Flippingbook to host our books has proven to be extremely effective, since it allows us to present the materials in accordance with our brand and host them in a variety of places with full confidence in the security of our resources. Whether we are making presentations, facilitating classes, training teachers, or sending homework, we use Flippingbook to help achieve our educational goals!