Frequently Asked Questions - Libraries

A: We serve libraries of every known shape, size, location, and budget. We serve small libraries with just a few staff as well as the largest systems with many hundreds of employees. We serve libraries that are almost entirely staffed by part timers and volunteers as well as libraries with highly specialized professionals. We serve libraries located on inner city streets as well as on rural routes. We serve libraries with thriving and secure budgets as well as those facing serious cuts. We have built the platform to add value for libraries that can create unique and extensive in-house training, but also get results as a plug-in solution that can work with near zero administrative overhead.

A: One simple answer is that Niche Academy provides effective self-help and takes customer service to the next level. Below you'll find an explanation for how this applies to eResource usage. It works the same way in other use cases, however. Examples include introducing people to social media, helping them find job search options, or online versions of library programs.

No one wants to look stupid. Many of us who end up calling a support line imagine the representative on the other side rolling their eyes at us. No matter how polite the person on the other end is, we imagine them thinking to themselves, “How can you not know that?” So, many of us try to find our own answers before calling.

While there are people who are still basically uncomfortable with search technology or who don’t have web access, an overwhelming majority of library patrons will look online before calling the library or coming in to speak with library staff. People expect online answers. This is particularly true for prospective eResource users. Most of these people have Internet access and a tech comfort level sufficient to give the eResources a try. Whether it's genealogy, language learning, eMagazines, or audiobooks, most prospective users will move on if we don't make it easy to get started.

Unfortunately, many libraries still rely on live instruction—in person or over the phone. This communicates that using the resource is complicated, not easy. Live instruction is only available during library hours. It's also dependent on the availability of knowledgeable staff.

For these reasons, video instruction is the best medium for introducing eResources. It sets an expectation for ease of use. It's available any time of day. It's not dependent on the availability of a particular staff person. It lets people review any instruction at any time in case they miss a step or forget something. Video also enhances the experience for people who still want or need live instruction. Live instruction will be more effective if someone has already watched a video. Video also gives learners something to refer back to.

Niche Academy creates and maintains up-to-date video tutorials for library eResources. It gives libraries a simple way to make these tutorials easy to find on the library website. It eliminates the distractions and extra navigation steps that are inevitable with YouTube videos or links to vendor websites. It is, quite simply, the easiest way to provide video tutorials for library patrons.

A: Almost every library we work with is being asked to accomplish more with fewer resources. It’s a frustrating reality. It’s one of the primary drivers in our development of Niche Academy. 

• If you want to save time by helping your staff to become more efficient and capable, the training available on Niche Academy will help you get there. 
• If you’d like to reduce the number of patron incidents that become a crisis or get escalated to management, the training available on Niche Academy will help you get there. 
• If you want to improve customer support but reduce the volume of direct support requests to library staff, Niche Academy self-help tutorials will help you get there. 

Niche Academy dramatically reduces the amount of overhead required to deliver effective training for both patrons and staff.  

A: You’re absolutely right. Addressing the real needs of library patrons and library staff is a complex business. Wherever we can, Niche Academy tries to absorb the complexity for you. We keep our tutorials up to date, we provide comprehensive support for widget implementation and place no limits on the number of support requests you can submit, we’ve created a community of problem-solvers all across the world sharing the training they’ve created... In the end, though, all we can offer is a process we know will work. In the real world, circumstances sometimes prevent individual libraries from implementing the full process. Not all libraries fully use the staff training. Not all libraries get the patron-facing widgets implemented. Experience has shown that even in those situations, there is still solid value in the parts they are able to use. 

A: If you’re seeing good usage and not using the Niche Academy process, imagine what your results might be if you did! Also, the value of a Niche Academy subscription goes way beyond increasing eResource circulations. Niche Academy is a full professional development tool that enhances the impact of almost everything else your do. The Niche Academy tutorial marketplace includes professional development training on every aspect of professional librarianship customer service, sensitivity to trauma, professional ethics, and diversity and inclusion, just to name a few. Niche Academy is also a powerful platform for dramatically increasing participation in library programs by making them available asynchronously and online.

A: LibWizards and Niche Academy are similar in several ways. Both offer a way to create interactive tutorial experiences for students, librarians, and patrons. Both allow those tutorials to be integrated into the campus LMS with an LTI connection, and both allow tutorials to be embedded as widgets within a library website. But there are two main differences: A Niche Academy subscription includes a collection of thousands of ready-made tutorials on information literacy, specific database introductions, customer service, etc. Additionally, unlike LibWizard, Niche Academy is a full learning management system as opposed to a tutorial creation tool. It includes learner reports, teams, supervisors, assignments, etc.

A: Niche Academy and Canvas are both learning management systems (LMSs) that allow instructors to create training and track learner progress, but Niche Academy offers additional advantages for academic libraries that are already using Canvas or another LMS as the main campus system including:

• a large collection of ready-made, professional quality tutorials teaching essential research skills, information literacy concepts, and introductions to academic databases
• the ability for teaching faculty in any department to add tutorials created in Niche Academy as assignments to any existing course and allow a librarian to directly interact with students and evaluate learning outcomes, even if they don't have access to the full course
• a much simpler interface for creating tutorials
• learner reports that provide direct evidence of student learning outcomes
• the ability to add database introductions to research-inclusive courses to significantly increase usage of library research databases

A: Currently (Apr 2023), over 1600 library systems use Niche Academy including state libraries, consortia, public library systems of every size, and academic libraries.

A: Niche Academy is currently (Apr 2023) in use at 35 State Libraries including 2 national libraries, 2 US protectorates and the District of Columbia.

A: Niche Academy has been creating tutorials for library eResources since 2014. They are used in hundreds of library systems throughout the world and have logged millions of views. We employ professional instructional designers, graphic artists, and researchers to ensure the quality of our tutorials. Their impact is evident in the dramatic eResource circulation increases we see in customer libraries that use our service.

A: Until you get to know us, we ask that you rely on the word of our customers. We invite you to speak with any of our customers. Ask them how we take care of people. Ask them whether we honor our commitments. Over the 6 years we’ve been in business, we have a 95% renewal rate. We believe this speaks to the value we provide.

A: Yes. There are a number of demo videos available on our website. If there’s something more specific you’d like to see, please send a note to info@nicheacademy.com and we’ll try to get you what you need.

A: We do occasionally encounter libraries with funding enough to create the training and maintain it with their own resources. We’ve found, though, that even these libraries choose to work with us because we can reduce the cost so significantly. This includes some of the largest library systems in the country (Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, etc.). Those libraries are then able to redeploy those resources to high-value projects like training for their maker-spaces, cultural building, and partnerships with local schools.

A: If your state library’s or consortium's subscription includes a subscription for each local library, you won’t need a separate subscription. If your state library’s subscription does not include a subscription for each local library, you’ll be able to access training that the state library provides, but you won’t have the ability to do any of following:

• Add widgets to your own website.
• Create your own local academies.
• Assign and track training at the local level.
• Create your own tutorials.

The most significant gains in program participation and eResource usage come when widgets are available within your local library’s website and patrons are connecting to programs created by local librarians.

A: Contact your area partnership manager and they’ll help you schedule a setup meeting. If you don’t know who your area partnership manager is, reach out with the phone number or the contact form on our website and we’ll get you started.

A: The Niche Academy User’s Group on Facebook is a great way to post questions and make connections. If you’re interested in connecting within a specific geographic region, see this map to find a customer near you. If you need to find a contact at a specific library or a library with specific attributes, reach out to our support team and we’ll hook you up.

A: If the security of your job is enhanced by measuring the direct value you provide, Niche Academy will help, not hurt. You'll be able to deliver more training and richer library learning experiences because the Niche Academy tutorial marketplace means you don't have to create training from scratch. You'll have more opportunities for direct interaction with learners. Niche will also make it easy for you to deliver reports on instructional outcomes.

Q: How much does Niche Academy cost?

A: Niche Academy uses a tiered pricing method based on the number of people in the library’s service population. The pricing tiers vary based on local currency. Contact Niche Academy to get a quote for your library.

A: Each library needs to determine for itself the value of increasing circulation numbers and program participation rates relative to other priorities for limited library funds. In every case, the cost of Niche Academy will be less than value we provide. A Niche Academy subscription will be less than the cost of other methods of providing equivalent training for library staff, for example.

A: YouTube makes money from advertising. When you use YouTube for free video hosting, you choose to also present your users with the video ads that Google determines will be most interesting to your users. Experience has shown that these video ads are a significant distraction and often deflect people from ever getting to the resources. Niche Academy presents no ads and the only branding your users will see is your own. Also, YouTube does not provide the library-specific training available on Niche Academy, nor does it include a learning management platform for training library staff.

A: A Niche Academy subscription includes all of the following:

• Access to all training created by Niche Academy and all training that other creators have freely shared within the platform. There are no additional fees based on how much you use.
• A full learning management system that you can use has you see fit. There are no additional fees based on how many tutorials you create or how much video you choose to host on the platform.
• A widget platform with 7 different widget types to choose from. 
• Unlimited professional support. Niche Academy customers have access to our support staff by phone, email, and by posting questions within the platform. In most cases, support questions are resolved the same day they are asked. This includes full onboarding services and widget implementation.

A: Configuration of customer academies and pre-population with tutorials from the Niche Academy Marketplace are included in the subscription price. There are no additional fees for support levels. Niche Academy does not create custom tutorials for individual customers, but we’re happy to support any technical questions that arise during the process.

A: Having a staff person that creates videos is a rare and valuable resource. Most of our customers who have a video creator on staff focus their efforts on other high impact creative projects. A Niche Academy subscription typically costs much less than the cost in staff hours and opportunity cost to recreate something Niche Academy has already created.

A: Niche Academy creates and maintains a continually growing collection of library eResource tutorials that includes all of the most commonly used library eResources. We prioritize new tutorials based on requests from our customers—priority is given to those most requested. In addition to the eResources tutorials, Niche Academy maintains a growing list of information literacy tutorials and professional development training on topics like “De-Escalation of Tense Situations”, “A Trauma-Informed Approach for Libraries”, and “Code of Ethics for New Directors”. Beyond the training created by Niche Academy, the tutorial marketplace contains hundreds of tutorials created by other libraries, state libraries, and professional trainers within the library world. 

A: Most of the training in the Niche Academy Marketplace is included with a subscription. A few professional trainers host their training on the Niche Academy platform and charge their own fee for access to their training. Examples of professional training that is available for a fee include:

• Ryan Dowd’s training on homelessness
• Andrew Sanderbeck’s People Connect Institute webinar series
• Linda Bruno’s Nibbles of Knowledge series
• Tobin Shearer’s Anti-Racism training

A: There are two kinds of learning assessment available within Niche Academy: formative assessment and summative assessment. 

• Formative assessment is embedded within the flow of learning to help create active learning experiences. Examples of formative assessment include quick response prompts, quizzes, and activities. Activities require the learner to complete an exercise of some kind (create a document, record themselves doing something, etc…) and then upload evidence of that completed activity (a video, a completed form, etc…). 
• Summative assessments serve to evaluate knowledge retention after the instruction is complete. Summative assessments usually take the form of a quiz that can be graded automatically. Quizzes can include multiple choice, select all that apply, and fill-in-the-blank questions. Activities can also be used as summative assessments.

A: To keep things simple, a Niche Academy subscription includes all features and full access to the marketplace. Luckily, our prices for small libraries are very reasonable. Also, we have a policy of not raising prices on existing subscribers, even when prices for new subscribers increase regularly.

A: Our usage data says yes. Our tutorials have logged almost 2.5M views in this year alone. We build all our content following principles of sound instructional design to make sure they are well adapted to the needs, interests, and vocabulary level of our target audiences.

A: No. eResource instruction videos available on YouTube come from one of two sources: 

1. Other libraries trying to provide instruction to their patrons, 
2. eResource vendors 

Tutorials created by other libraries are often branded by the creating library and reflect configurations that don’t match what local patrons will find.

Tutorials created by eResource vendors are usually intended to market the resources to librarians rather than provide instruction to patrons and library staff. They are seldom built and organized with instructional design expertise. The learner experience and the usage results we provide are so good that many eResource vendors actively support our efforts and encourage their customer libraries to subscribe to Niche Academy.

Niche Academy eResource tutorials are customizable to match the needs of individual libraries and their target audience. They provide a consistent and positive learner experience across all the library’s eResources. They are only available through the Niche Academy platform.

A: Widgets provide a consistent way for patrons to get instruction within your website. Experience has shown that they are a key factor in dramatically increasing usage of electronic resources. They allow you to reach people who are reluctant to reach out in person or over the phone. They also reach people who are curious outside of your regular operating hours.

Q: Do we have to be a subscriber to get the Homelessness training from Ryan Dowd? If we subscribe to Ryan Dowd’s training, do we get access to the Niche Academy marketplace?

A: You don’t need to subscribe to Niche Academy to get the Homelessness training from Ryan Dowd. We set up a limited online academy for libraries that only subscribe to Ryan Dowd’s training or to one of the other training vendors that use the Niche Academy platform. They are able to assign and track training, but cannot create their own tutorials or access the Niche Academy marketplace. Access to these features requires a Niche Academy subscription. 

A: While we’ve never actually encountered this situation, we can tell you what our policies indicate. Because people retain the intellectual property rights to the tutorials they share on the platform, they would, in theory, have the right to change or remove what they have shared. If they have allowed people to make copies of their tutorial, any copies made would not be affected.

A: This is very common. Most of our customers are in this situation. Even many who begin with the intention of creating tutorials often find that life gets in the way. This is why we create tutorials and why we created the marketplace where people can share the things they create. In addition to the tutorials Niche Academy provides, people have been generous with their work. There are over 2000 tutorials in the marketplace on a wide range of topics. If you don’t have time to create your own tutorials, you can use what others have created. 

A: The administrative interface for uploading videos in Niche Academy includes a place for you to upload an SRT file (the text file with timestamps that goes along with a video). We use a company called Rev.com to create our closed captions. We’ve been happy with their quality and their price is very reasonable.

A: Currently, we don’t curate content on the Marketplace. Our Copyright Policy relies on reporting for enforcement. As the range of content available has expanded, we’ve had a number of requests for a rating and comments system in the marketplace, so we’re currently exploring that possibility. 

A: We currently impose a 2GB limit for video uploads.

A: Most of the training available in the Niche Academy Marketplace is available to all subscribers at no additional charge. The Marketplace also includes tutorials that have been created by professional trainers who sell their training on the Niche Academy platform. These trainers set their own prices. There is a toggle within the marketplace to only show tutorials that are freely available to all subscribers. 

If you don’t have a subscription, there are a few entities who use the Niche Academy platform to make training freely available to anyone who needs it. One example of this is the Reopening Lives Academy that many volunteers collaboratively created to help handle common questions emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. Other entities that provide free training include EveryLibrary, Infopeople, and the California Center for the Book.

A: Depending on the scope of the change, Niche Academy can turn around an update within a few days to a few weeks. Because we actively watch for new and upcoming changes, we’re often able to make the updates before most of our customers are even aware of the change. In some notable cases, we’ve made updates even before the vendor sales staff knew the changes were coming.

A: To date we have a limited number of tutorials in Spanish, German, and Arabic (as well some regional variations in UK and Australian English). We also offer a number of non-English subtitled tutorials where appropriate. We prioritize tutorial creation based on customer requests. As we expand our presence beyond English speaking world, we anticipate creating more non-English tutorials. We track tutorial requests in the Niche Academy User’s Group on Facebook. Please let us know what tutorials you’d like to see.

A: Yes. When you upload SRT files for your own videos, you have the option to specify a language. If you’d like to see a subtitle translation for a Niche Academy tutorial, please make the request on the Niche Academy User’s Group on Facebook.

A: To present your own content within Niche Academy, use the following process:

1. Create a new tutorial within one of your own academies.
2. Upload your content within that new tutorial. Niche Academy supports a wide range of content formats including video, audio, text-based, and images.
3. Invite learners to take your new training.

The following tutorial provides a bit more detail for the curious: Creating a Tutorial.

A: When you add a tutorial from the Niche Academy Marketplace into your own academy, you can do any of the following to adapt the tutorial to your needs:

• Insert custom text above the text within an existing lesson.
• Add your own custom elements like lessons, quizzes, and activities
• Hide elements in the shared tutorial that don’t match your local circumstances.

None of these adaptations will modify the original shared tutorial. For this reason, you won’t be able to modify the original text or the video content shared by the tutorial creator.

Tutorial creators have the option to allow other users to create a local copy of their tutorial. If the original creator allows copies, when you create a copy of a shared tutorial within your own academy, you are able to directly modify your copy without impacting the work of the original creator.

A: You can add any content presented in the Niche Academy Marketplace to your own academy. Whenever users create content on the Niche Academy platform, they have the option to share that content into the Niche Academy Marketplace. Creators have the option to allow or not allow other users to create copies of their tutorials. The default setting is not to allow copies. Creators also have the option to require an additional fee for the use of their tutorials. If a tutorial requires a separate fee, users of that tutorial will only be able to make that tutorial available to enrolled learners that have been explicitly invited or authorized to use that training.

A: Niche Academy is a white-labeled product, which means that the only branding presented within the user interface is the branding chosen by the subscribing entity. Because we are assiduous about the quality of the user experience, we take a minimalist approach to branding. The logo or the name of the subscribing entity is presented in the top left of the user interface whether in mobile or desktop view. The primary color scheme of the academy may also be set to match the branding of the subscribing entity.

A: Niche Academy updates tutorial content whenever there are meaningful changes to the user interface of the functionality of covered eResources. We typically turn around updates within a few weeks of becoming aware of the change. If the change does not require video updating, we can make them in a matter of days. In most cases we publish updates before our customers are even aware of the change so the transition is seamless from their perspective. If you’re curious about when the last update was published for any given tutorial, you’ll find a “Last Updated” date when you preview a tutorial within the marketplace.

A: Niche Academy publishes new tutorials a couple of times a month. New content is added by other contributors on a daily basis. The marketplace features a “Recently Added” section showing the 50 most recent contributions. This makes it easy to browse for new material of interest.

A: Our tutorial creation queue is driven by customer requests. Priority is given to the most frequently requested tutorials. There is no additional cost for training that is added through Niche Academy’s content queue.

A: No. SCORM is a legacy standard for sharing instructional content. Niche Academy currently supports the import of packages of HTML-formatted content using the xAPI standard. xAPI (formerly known as (Tin Can) is the current standard for sharing online learning content and provides a better learner experience than what is available with the older SCORM standard.

A: No. SCORM separates content from the presentation and tends to provide poor learner experiences. Content extraction is also incompatible with our subscription-based business model.

A: We don't support AICC. AICC, like SCORM, is a legacy standard for sharing instructional content. We're unlikely to implement it for a few reasons:

• It doesn't give us a way to control the presentation of the content and hence the quality of the learning experience.
• It's a standard with a continually decreasing footprint.
• It doesn't allow for progress tracking

The current LTI standard is widely adopted and addresses the concerns listed above. Our intent is to continue to support the LTI standard.

A: Niche Academy tutorials can be added to a website by means of a “widget”. A widget is a tiny snippet of code that is added to a website. When the code snippet is added to the website a new element appears on the web page. When a website user clicks on that new element, a tutorial is presented. The new widget elements may look like any of the following:

• Carousel
• Button
• Image
• Floating Side Button
• Icon
• Link

You can choose how you want the tutorial to be presented when the user clicks on the widget. The following options are available:

• Open in a lightbox within the page
• Open in a sliding side drawer within the page
• Open in a new browser tab

The code snippet for a widget consists of two parts: a script and an HTML element.

• The script will look something like this: <script async src="https://my.nicheacademy.com/api/widgets/demo"></script>
• The HTML element will look something like this: <img class="1bvkk2r1v38"/>

The script can be placed anywhere on the page and only needs to be added once, no matter how many widgets are placed on the page. The HTML element for each widget will need to be placed at the location on the page where you want the widget to appear.

A: Niche Academy supports content that is made to be shared according to the XAPI (Tin Can) standard. If you have created learning experiences with a tool like Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline, for example, you can export that content to an HTML format and then upload that content seamlessly into Niche Academy.

A: The primary use case for our training is asynchronous. Learners can use our training on their own schedule and at their own convenience. We have a number of customers, however, who use the training synchronously, for example, as part of a live group meeting. We have added features to specifically support this use case such as a configuration that allows automatic flow from one lesson to the next without the need to click “Next”.

A: Yes. Niche Academy is compliant with the WCAG 2.1 standard at the AA level. This is something we work hard to maintain as we continuously update the platform. If you spot anything that’s slipped through our testing, please let us know. A thorough enumeration of our compliance level is available in the Niche Academy Accessibility Conformance Report or VPAT. You can download that report by clicking here.

A: If individual customers have specific SLA requirements we are usually able to meet them. We maintain more than 99% uptime and our deployment process does not require any scheduled maintenance outages. We have a policy to proactively notify customers of outages and to be fully transparent about issues that arise. Our disaster recovery plans are outlined in our Information Security Policies.

Q: What web browsers do you support?

A: We support the current versions of the following web browsers:

• Chrome
• Edge
• Safari
• Firefox

We don’t support Internet Explorer.

A: Currently, we don’t have built in support for Google Analytics. This is a feature we’re considering for the future, but, to date, we have been able to meet the usage tracking and statistical reporting needs of our customers with our native usage stats, learner reports, and tutorial reports.

A: Niche Academy provides multiple mechanisms for bundling or grouping training to meet the needs of individual learners.

• Academies—Academies are collections of tutorials intended for a specific learner audience. Most library customers, for example, have separate academies for public and staff audiences. Niche Academy does not limit the number of academies customers can create as long as customers don’t create academies for audiences beyond the scope of their license.
• Tutorial categories—Within an academy, administrators can group tutorials into categories. Categories can reflect unique audiences, learner roles, or topics. An individual tutorial can be included in multiple categories. Within an academy, tutorials can be presented grouped by categories.
• Pathways—A Pathway is a set of tutorials that are grouped sequentially to help learners master a body of knowledge by moving through a syllabus or a curriculum of training experiences. Learners are able to track their progress through a learning pathway and receive a certificate of completion at the end. Administrators have the option to require tutorial completion in a designated order or allow learners to choose their own order.

A: There are two basic ways to assign tutorials within the Niche Academy administrative user interface: 

• Select a learner and then select one or more tutorials from a list of available tutorials within the academy to assign to that learner. Rather than selecting just one learner, it’s also possible to select a group of learners before selecting and assigning the tutorials.
• Select a tutorial or a group of tutorials and then select one or learners to be assigned.

To make it easier to select groups of learners or groups of tutorials in either of the above scenarios, the administrative interface allows you to filter the list of tutorials by category and the list of learners by teams. Teams can be created to reflect a specific role or location. When dealing with large and fluid groups of learners, administrators also have the option to allow learners to assign themselves to teams. An individual learner can belong to more than one team.

A: There are two basic progress reports within the administrative user interface:

• The Learner Report shows progress for individual learners or teams of learners.
• The Tutorial Report shows learner progress organized by specific tutorials or categories of tutorials.

Both of these reports can be downloaded as CSV files.

A: Niche Academy offers three levels of administrative access:

• Administrators—have full access to an academy. They can invite new learners as well as new admins and also remove them, edit tutorials, set up widgets, and see all reports.
• Supervisors—can invite new learners and see reports for learners on the teams they are assigned to. They can’t edit tutorials, create widgets, or change settings for the academy.
• Instructors—can invite learners, edit tutorials, and see reports. They can’t edit any academy settings or create widgets.

A We have 3 basic access levels for securing content hosted on the platform:

• Free: Tutorials designated as free are available without restriction to anyone who accesses them. We don't track any information about individual learners for free tutorials, just the number of views.
• Enrollment Required: Tutorials designated as "enrollment required" are freely available, but require learners to log in before accessing them. This allows administrators to track learner progress.
• Private: Only learners that have been explicitly invited will be allowed to access any part of the tutorial past the introduction.

Administrators can also choose not to show a tutorial on the main academy page if they want to limit the visibility of a tutorial.

The "Private" designation can also be set at the academy level, rendering all tutorials within the academy effectively private.

A: The following reports are available within the platform:

• Usage Statistics—shows the number of views for specific tutorials within a selected date range. A view is logged when someone opens a lesson or other element within a tutorial. Out of respect for privacy concerns, no individually identifiable information is logged with a view.
• Learner Report—shows exactly what training has been completed by enrolled learners. It includes responses to quizzes, activities, quick responses, etc. It shows progress towards completion, quiz scores, due dates, and the number of continuing education credits earned.
• Tutorial Report—shows learner progress information organized by individual tutorials. This allows administrators to track the effectiveness of specific training efforts across the organization.
• Shared Tutorial Report—shows usage statistics for all tutorials that have been shared in the Niche Academy Marketplace. It shows what other academies are using those shared tutorials, but does not include information about individual learners within other academies.

A: Niche Academy can automatically create accounts for learners invited with an email address. Email addresses can be batch loaded as a comma-separated list. If training is created within Niche Academy that is a parallel to previous training offered outside of Niche Academy, administrators have the ability to manually mark that training as completed for learners who completed the training before it was added to Niche Academy.

A: Niche Academy is typically ready for a customer to launch within 1 day of contract execution. The new customer onboarding process is as follows:

1. Immediately upon contract execution, Niche Academy sales staff send a welcome email that includes 
1. links to our standard online training material for new customers
2. a link to choose a time for a setup meeting with Niche support staff. Customers can choose a time for that meeting as soon as the next day.
3. A form with which customers can select tutorials they would like to have pre-populated within their academy.
2. Niche support staff come to the setup meeting with academies created, configured, and pre-populated to match customer requirements. In the setup meeting, support staff train new customers on the following:
1. Inviting learners
2. Tracking learner progress
3. Creating new tutorials
4. Managing an academy
5. Implementing widgets
3. Niche staff is available after the onboarding meeting for whatever support is necessary, including additional onboarding sessions, troubleshooting, and general Q&A. Most customers are actively using Niche Academy at the conclusion of the setup meeting. At the discretion of the customer, additional time and support may be needed to complete tasks like widget implementation or custom tutorial configuration.

A: The Niche Academy learner interface has a “My Tutorials” view that shows a logged in user all the tutorials in which the learner is enrolled. For each tutorial a completion percentage is also presented.

A: The following secure mechanisms are available within the Niche Academy platform to facilitate communication between administrators and learners:

• Tutorial assignments or invitations—Administrators invite individual learners to participate in specific tutorials by assigning those tutorials from within the administrative UI. If the assignment is to a new learner, the platform will create an account for that learner and the invitation email will include a temporary password.
• Instructions within tutorials—Administrators can communicate with learners through the instructions they provide within individual tutorials.
• Activities—Learners can communicate with administrators through the responses they provide to activity prompts. The response could take the form of a written response or a document upload of some kind. Administrators have the chance to give feedback on Activity responses by accepting or rejecting the response and providing written feedback.
• Quick Responses—Learners can communicate with administrators through the responses they provide to the Quick Response formative assessment mechanism.
• Third Party Integrations—Niche Academy provides a mechanism for embedding third party communication tools within tutorials. These third party mechanisms may be forms, surveys, or chat tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams.

A: When a learner completes a tutorial or a learning pathway, they are presented with a downloadable certificate of completion. The certificate of completion contains the following information:

• The name of the tutorial or learning pathway
• The name of the learner
• The name of the academy
• The date of completion
• (optional) The average score for any quizzes presented in the training

A: All learner-facing user interfaces are built to be mobile responsive. Niche Academy was built on the assumption that use on a mobile device would be a primary use case for all Niche Academy training. A mobile responsive interface is one where the content is just as easy to use and interact with on a small mobile screen as it is on a desktop monitor.

A: The Niche Academy learner registration interface requests the following information:

• First and last name
• Email address
• Password

A learner can create an account on their own by going to the Niche Academy login view and selecting the option to create an account. If a learner is invited to Niche Academy by a subscribing entity, an account is created for them at the time the invitation is extended. The invitation includes a temporary password. The first time the learner logs in with that temporary password, they will be prompted to enter their name and choose their own password.

A: No. One of the essential advantages of our cloud-based architecture is the ability to add resources (more memory, more processors, faster processors, more storage...) should the demand on our servers ever require it. We have active alarms in place to alert us if we ever begin to approach our usage thresholds. We keep our readily available resources comfortably above our observed usage patterns. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, we saw an eightfold increase in usage within a matter of days without any degradation in the responsiveness of our service.

A: We don’t charge any more when our subscribers add administrative users. Our licensing agreement does, however, preclude granting administrative access to users outside the licensing organization.

A: LibGuides is a library oriented Content Management System that is used to present information and count the number of views.

Niche Academy is a library oriented Learning Management System that is used to create interactive tutorials and measure learning outcomes. Niche Academy lets you provide feedback to individual learners and offer library instruction directly within the campus LMS.

Niche Academy customers will often embed tutorials within LibGuides to enrich the information presented there. Niche Academy offers a number of visually appealing embed options for this use case.

A: Both Niche Academy and Info Lit - Core accomplish some of the same things. Both products offer, for example:

• Standards-aligned tutorials teaching essential information literacy skills
• Integration with campus LMS systems like Canvas
• Robust reporting on usage and student progress
• Customization options that let you adapt instruction to the needs of your institution, specific instructors, courses, and classes.
• Metrics to demonstrate the impact of Info Lit instruction to other campus stakeholders
• Compliance with accessibility and privacy requirements.

The differences are based on fundamentally different business models. Infobase is a publisher that licenses content. Niche Academy is a software company whose revenue is tied to a simple platform subscription. As a result, you'll notice that Niche Academy offers

• more open educational resources available through the platform, including content created by other libraries and experts in the community
• no additional charges based on which tutorials you use or how much you use them
• more attention to the quality of the user experience for learners, instructors, and content creators. It's easier to create and customize training on the platform. It's easier to find and generate reports.
• there are more options for interactive instruction with Niche Academy including activities, open-ended response prompts, polls, etc. It is a fully baked LMS in its own right. In fact staff training is a primary use case for most of our customers and you'll find lots of professional development instruction available on the platform.
• there are more ways to embed tutorial experiences within websites and online tools like LibGuides

Niche Academy provides online professional development and continuing education for librarians. The platform includes access to a training marketplace with over 2000 tutorials covering every aspect of professional librarianship. The marketplace includes training created by Niche Academy and experts in the library field. It also allows libraries to share training with each other so you can reuse and adapt material created by peers around the world. LinkedIn Learning does not offer training in professional librarianship.

Because Niche Academy is a robust learning management platform, libraries use it to invite staff to take specific training and to track their progress. It is used to create comprehensive staff training programs from onboarding to continuing education. LinkedIn Learning is not a learning management system. It does not have a way, for example, for libraries to create their own training.

Niche Academy is also a community outreach tool for introducing patrons to library resources and helping them learn how to use them. The platform includes a space-efficient way to embed tutorials in the library's own website. Patron-facing tutorials teach people how to use the library's eBooks, audiobooks, and language learning tools, for example. There is even a tutorial introducing LinkedIn Learning and teaching people how to use it.

A: No. A Niche Academy subscription includes unlimited professional support. See the answer above on what’s included in the price.

A: Niche Academy support specialists can be reached by phone, by email, or through questions submitted within the platform itself. In addition to the live support, Niche Academy provides a searchable knowledge base and a collection of self-paced help tutorials covering basic administrative tasks and the process for tutorial creation.

A: Niche Academy carefully monitors the amount of time to an initial response and the amount of time that elapses before an issue is resolved. In most cases, we’re able to provide an initial response within an hour or two and most issues and questions are resolved the same day they are submitted. 

A: Niche Academy support can’t create custom tutorials for individual customers and we can’t provide translation services for customer-created training. We can’t provide website design services.

A: The Niche Academy uses a disciplined development process that produces an extraordinarily low level of what we call “technical debt”. This allows us to support a steady rhythm of new feature releases that generally follow a 4-6 week pattern. Our process also allows us to address bugs with hotfix releases as soon as they are identified. Most reported bugs are resolved within a matter of days.

A: Niche Academy provides the following training options for all new customers:

• Self-paced tutorials that cover all essential aspects of the Niche Academy platform
• Live online training sessions with Niche Academy support staff. We don’t impose a limit on the number of these sessions or charge extra for support calls.
• A searchable knowledge base of answers to common questions.

A: Niche Academy provides live technical support during business hours. There is no additional charge levied for Niche Academy support and there are no support tiers. Small customers get the same thoughtful attention as everyone else.  

All aspects of initial onboarding are included in the Niche Academy support offering including:

• The creation of customer academies and initial population of appropriate tutorials from the Niche Academy marketplace.
• Basic configuration of tutorials within each customer academy including invitation of learners, the addition of custom links, and showing or hiding available tutorial elements appropriately for the intended audience.
• The creation of website widgets and their integration into a customer’s website. When a customer doesn’t have administrative access to their website, we work directly with the third party who does to ensure efficient communication. In many cases, our customers provide temporary administrative access to Niche Academy support staff in order to maximize the efficiency of widget implementation.
• Live training calls with all customer staff that need to learn how to use Niche Academy.

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A: Niche Academy is a fully hosted cloud-based service.

Q: Where are your platform servers located?

A: We use the AWS platform to host Niche Academy. Our primary backend servers are located in the US Oregon AWS region. In order to improve performance, the frontend of our application is replicated globally, on the AWS CloudFront network.

A: Essential platform security measures, including product design, access controls, monitoring, physical security, and Incident Response are outlined in our Information Security Policies.

A: Our data is stored on our dedicated AWS (Amazon Web Services) servers in the AWS Oregon region. Direct remote access to our production database is controlled by public-private key encryption and is limited to a small number of explicitly authorized IP addresses. Access logs are preserved and are available for forensic purposes should that ever become necessary.

A: We take regular snapshots of our application database using the AWS RDS service. The AWS infrastructure also includes extensive safeguards against physical disc failure and natural disasters. These safeguards include RAID disc storage across multiple physical locations. We have an automated alarm system in place to guard against storage overflow.

A: Our production database contains limited personally identifiable information. This information is limited to a name and an email address. The only potentially sensitive information that can be linked to individuals consists of tutorial completion records for enrolled learners. No potentially sensitive information is stored for learners that are not enrolled.

A: We use the AWS (Amazon Web Services) platform.

A: Our plan is to remain a fully cloud-based solution.