This past year’s transition to online learning, especially for movement classes like yoga and fitness, has left millions of teachers and students underwhelmed and frustrated. PIVOT Yoga Teacher from TuringSense launches today to put an end to unsatisfying online classes and ring in a new era of detailed teacher feedback for students. The all-in-one, affordable platform combines innovative 3D livestreaming and live video annotation with powerful practice management tools to push the capabilities of online teaching even beyond the standard in-person studio experience.
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PIVOT Yoga Teacher reimagines online teaching with powerful tools never before available. (Graphic: Business Wire)
The product, developed with teachers and available for macOS, combines two core capabilities in one place. It allows teachers to price, track, analyze, and manage classes and students. And it lets teachers conduct powerful livestreamed classes, built from the ground up around the idea of teacher feedback. So a teacher’s classes aren’t just easier to manage, they’re better for students, too. To do this, PIVOT Yoga teacher has had to innovate in a number of ways, both in the in-class experience and outside of class.
In-Class Experience for PIVOT Yoga Teacher
- Teaching From the Desk: In a typical online yoga class, the teacher leads students by demonstrating poses from the mat. With PIVOT Yoga, teachers instead use a pre-recorded video (or a live model) to demonstrate poses. Teaching from the desk in this way lets teachers avoid fatigue and focus 100% on their students as they move through the sequence. Students see both pose demonstration and a live inset video of the teacher offering guidance.
- 3D Livestreaming: For each student wearing a smart PIVOT Yoga Shirt and Pant, teachers receive a live 3D avatar display, 50 times a second, and can view it upon demand. This display allows the teacher to see any side of the student’s pose, including an overhead view, and works the same regardless of the student’s lighting conditions or phone placement.
- Live Video Annotations: Teachers can annotate on any screen that is broadcast to students — on a teaching video, on a live model’s video, a highlight, or even on a student’s avatar. While perhaps common in television broadcasting, this feature has never before available to yoga teachers in such an easy package.
- Highlights & Kudos: Teachers have a rich set of feedback tools even for students not wearing the PIVOT Yoga Shirt and Pant. For example, a teacher can capture any single frame of teaching or student video. Then, at the end of the class, the teacher can animate through these highlights, to reinforce teaching points. And during the class flow, the teacher can always send nonverbal feedback to a student by sending a Kudo, which functions a bit like a Like button but also sends a brief animation to play on the student’s phone to congratulate them.
Outside of Class
- Performance Tracking: If a student is wearing the PIVOT Yoga Shirt and Pant during class, their postures are captured automatically in PIVOT Yoga Teacher and compared against reference poses. This scoring algorithm allows the teacher to see long-term performance tracking of each student. In fact, PIVOT Yoga Teacher can display, for any tracked student, how their yoga has changed over time in any given pose. This information is also used to flag milestones for each student — the first time the student does a new pose, or the best version of a pose ever. Last, this kind of performance tracking enables calculation of which poses in a class are most difficult for each student or for the class overall.
- Expanded Class Management: A teacher can create, price, configure and schedule classes, which incorporate integrated payment and access control for students. But more than this, each class is assigned a permanent home inside the PIVOT Yoga Teacher app, where everything about a class is displayed, both before and after class: ticket sales, highlights, student feedback, student milestones, and more.
- Integrated Pose Lists & Titling: Teachers can upload teaching videos of sequences and mark them up easily, without the use of a video editor, to show what poses occur and when during the sequence. This is converted automatically into pose titles displayed to students during class.
Pricing
All of PIVOT Yoga Teacher’s powerful features are available for no monthly fee to teachers, who are charged a simple 12% of revenue, which covers credit card processing fees as well. For a teacher with 100 students a month, PIVOT Yoga Teacher could easily cost four times less than major practice management tools today that have none of the innovative features available in PIVOT Yoga Teacher.
Online yoga is here to stay and is part of the larger virtual fitness market, which is forecasted to grow from a $6 billion industry in 2019 to $59 billion by 2027 (Allied Market Research). This is driven no doubt by teachers being forced to develop new habits of teaching online, while studios have been closed. Once they reopen, online group classes are expected to remain critically important even after the global pandemic is over.1 So getting the experience right is paramount.
“The world has changed for all of us, and yoga teachers in particular are struggling with making the most of limited and expensive online options. PIVOT Yoga Teacher is here to help,” said TuringSense co-founder and CEO Joe Chamdani. “We are proud to offer yoga teachers the ability to not just survive during this period of change, but to take their teaching to a new, deeper level on the way to success for themselves and for their students.”
Become a PIVOT Yoga Teacher
PIVOT Yoga Teacher is available today. Interested yoga teachers should apply here.
About TuringSense
TuringSense, a pioneer in online movement teaching and intelligent wearable technology, is revolutionizing instruction for all kinds of human movement with its multi-patented 3D digital motion capture technology. Its PIVOT-branded products help consumers track progress and learn faster, in both live and on-demand applications. Founded in 2015 by a founding team of elite-level athletes and research PhDs, the company is venture-backed and based in Santa Clara, CA, the heart of Silicon Valley USA. www.turingsense.com
1The TuringSense 2020 Yoga Teacher Survey (n=100) found that yoga teachers expect online yoga classes to be 6X as important after the pandemic as they were before the pandemic, and that online teaching will be approximately as important as in-studio teaching even after studios are re-opened.
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