Advanced Contract Award Notice:
To Contract with Advantage Design Group of Jacksonville Florida to collaborate on a Orientation Platform. The sole sole justification is as follows:
Absence of Competition for Technical Reasons
• There is no platform that offers the same level of gamification, interactivity, and complete institutional brand alignment that Advantage Design offers.
• Many of Advantage Design’s clients in the United States have categorized them as Sole Source vendors.
• There were two other types of online orientation softwares investigated:
o Innovative Educators
o Comevo
• Advantage Design is the only orientation software provider, who uses Canadian servers, and who provides an inclusive, in-house turnkey solution for online orientation.
o Innovative Educators has no Canadian clients.
Features found only in Advantage Design:
• Compared to Comevo and Innovative Educators, Advantage Design is the only platform that allows for significantly more customization of brand and visual appearance of the online orientation.
o Comevo uses templated designs where we are limited in what we can alter in the overall appearance of the course (limited to inserting logo and colors).
o These platforms do not offer in-house UX designers and full course customization that Advantage Design provides.
o For Advantage design, the course is customized to the institution and built from scratch after an initial concept is selected.
• Advantage Design has in-house videographers to support video content creation, compared to other companies that contract this work out.
• Advantage Design has a personalized resource function, in which students can check off resources throughout the course to make a customized resource page for themselves upon course completion.
• Different versions of the course for specific student demographics, but it is all housed within one platform. Platforms such as Comevo, require you to make multiple versions of the same course, meaning you need to update the same content multiple times.
• The levels of interactivity for Advantage Design surpass any offered by other platforms.
o There is the gamification of content using an “Achievement Bar” feature that is specific to Advantage Design, as well as “badges” that students can receive when completing content.
o Advantage Design allows for slide templates to look completely different from one another, using matching games, word searches, different content layout such as accordion style menus, to encourage student engagement. Comevo does not offer any of these engagement features.
• Advantage Design allows us to time certain pages/slides of content to ensure students are spending the appropriate amount of time on each area of content.
o Comevo does not have this feature, only that we can make sure a video has been played, but students could skip to the end of the video without watching it. Comevo cannot time section single pages of content, only entire sections of course content.
• Advantage Design allows us to release certain modules at specific times.
o Comevo does not have this feature. We’d have to wait to “publish” content when we would want it opened up.
• Advantage Design allows Administrators to track changes made by other orientation staff and “undue” changes if necessary.
o This feature is crucial, as we anticipate multiple staff having back-end access to the platform to support content
development and updating.
