Jean-Marie Cognet
CEO and founder of Ubicast

UbiCast is 15 years old. What are your best memories of 15 years as an entrepreneur ?

There are a lot of them! Already, seeing your first projects come to fruition with pioneering customers who put their trust in you, who help you grow as a person and as a company, was fantastic. I was also impressed by the moments of team sharing. Because you can never really go far on your own. Knowing how to surround yourself with people is essential, and when you have the right people around you, nothing is impossible. So celebrating successes together, defining a long-term corporate vision as a team, is as important as it is motivating! Finally, I can’t help but think of the Moodlemoot, the annual event that brings together the community of Moodle users. We may be there in a professional setting, with our customers and prospects, but it’s all done in a relaxed, friendly, simple atmosphere, which in the end is just like us. You’d almost forget that we’re a company, not a higher education establishment !

According to your 2022 survey on the use of educational video in the public higher education sector, you are the platform most used by establishments. How do you explain this success ?

What’s great is that the survey respondents themselves told us: the availability of UbiCast teams to help with usage and solve problems. But also the partnership approach that materializes in listening to needs. Last but not least, the ease with which the different types of users of our video platforms – teachers, students and administrators – can get to grips with them.

I’ve always believed that you can’t do business without establishing a relationship of trust, based on listening to each other. That’s what I’ve always passed on to the UbiCast teams. Right from the start, our technological roadmap was written by our customers and prospects. We gather all the needs, and those that seem to be shared by the community become our priorities. Secondly, it’s always a question of selling fairly. If we want to build long-term relationships, we have to be honest and transparent, and have a business ethic. I make it a personal affair and do everything I can to ensure that our teams adhere to it, because our customers know and feel it.

What are your ambitions for the next 15 years ?

We must continue to move in the direction that motivates us, i.e. in support of modern, engaging teaching practices at the service of students. There’s no doubt that more and more resources will be available online. Our solutions need to encourage interaction between teachers and students, and between students and teachers. This is the driving force that will propel digital uses towards academic success. Secondly, the data generated by the use of our solutions must be analyzed in depth to shed light on practices. In particular, we need to be able to identify drop-outs, and offer students content that matches their career plans and educational video consumption habits.

And if you’d like to find out more about the importance of using video in an educational environment, the Robots were already talking to you about it back in January 2021 in this article