Month: July 2016

Recent years have seen the invention of a plethora of new digital media, from self-marking activities to smart ebooks, from podcasts to animations and games. But even now, the print components of a course are often favoured by teachers and students as the crucial hub of a course, even when enhanced by these digital innovations.

Avallain has great respect for print, partly in recognition of educational tradition, and also acknowledging, as engineers, the technological superiority of print as an undemanding, always operational, visual and haptic carrier of information. Nevertheless we understand that for publishers, the duplication of effort between print and digital production creates a significant strain on time and budgets. It stands to reason that removing this duplication would enable the industry to give greater focus to creativity of commissioning, authorship and design, and to make full use of the strengths of each medium, separately, and in combination.

With these as our principles, we have long researched the ideal blend of print and digital workflows. This journey led us to our partner Seinet, a provider based in Madrid that has its origins in editorial content management systems for print magazines, but now provides smart content management to support the diverse needs of modern publishing. Their outstanding Xtent solution is centred upon an abstracted content database, and achieves flatpanel layouting, InDesign integration and many input and output transformations at scale and speed. Combining this power with Avallain Author, our authoring solution, provides something unique: transparent editing, output to print and digital, with the kind of version, state and permissions control you would expect from an advanced content management system.

Consider, then, a typical multi-component course involving textbooks and accompanying interactive content for apps and a learning platform. Discover a typo? One intervention fixes it for reprint, for download and immediate use online. Need to modify a heading in the app and carry that change through to the learning platform and the next print edition? One edit does it all. Keen to create new ancillary content for digital and then print a loose-leaf edition to go with it? We have you covered. And all this within a controlled, tracked workflow that retains the quality and editorial rigor expected in great publishing.

This integration of Avallain Author and Xtent is already being piloted at our major publishing clients, and we are excited by early results. If you would like to join the blended publishing revolution, please contact us to enter the program.

Ignacio Megasias, CEO of Seinet, says:

We are delighted to be working with Avallain to bring the best of content management to a new kind of educational publishing: one which frees authors and editors to focus on the quality and creativity of the content, while intelligent tools manage publication to a range of media and devices. In this way we hope to make educational publishing more efficient, more responsive, and at the same time, more innovative.”

Max Bondi, Product Manager of Avallain Author, says:

The pioneering blend of Avallain’s expertise in dynamic digital authoring, and Seinet’s pedigree in smart content management, promises a new era in educational publishing. Our integrated service provides publishers with new efficiencies, while extending their reach across print and digital. We are looking forward to involving other clients in our pilot project over the coming months.

Seinet is an independent, privately owned company based in Madrid, providing publishing platforms to the global education and media industries. Founded in 2001 with the mission to deliver a “create once, publish anywhere” content management solution, Seinet has moved from traditional print media to become the only content management system provider to integrate both publishing and e-learning functionality.

InDesign is a Trademark of Adobe.

A new exam-revision mobile application from Oxford University Press, developed in collaboration with Avallain, promises to transform the way children prepare for Kenya’s primary and secondary exams.

The ExamPoa app delivers on-demand bundles of quizzes, notes and model exams, which offer instant feedback, allowing students to test themselves, hone their studies and address areas of weakness. The app breaks new ground in distance learning for Kenyan schoolchildren, using mobile technology to reach learners throughout the vast country, and to offer them a more flexible and responsive form of study. The quizzes, notes and model exams may be downloaded and used offline, freeing learners to complete their revision anytime, anywhere. Prepared initially to support learners of English and Science at primary level, and English, Biology and History at secondary level, ExamPoa will expand over time to offer support in other subject areas.

James Ogolla, Marketing Manager at Oxford University Press East Africa said:

ExamPoa addresses an increasing demand from Kenya’s young students for digital resources that offer a level of feedback and support that is not always possible in class. Our engaging but rigorous resources, combined with Avallain’s reliable, intuitive technology, truly answer that call. We look forward to expanding the service to other areas of the curriculum.

We are delighted to have collaborated with Oxford University Press to develop such an innovative and valuable service for Kenya’s students,” commented Ursula Suter, Co-Founder of Avallain. “We have worked hard to ensure that our technology is appropriate to the needs of Kenya’s students, allowing them to study on a range of devices, with or without an Internet connection. But as ever, it is not the technology that we wish to be the focus, but the excitement and reward of a great learning experience. We know from early feedback from schoolchildren that ExamPoa is proving worthy of its Kiswahili name: Poa, meaning ‘good’ or ‘cool’!

Established in 1954, Oxford University Press East Africa is a leading educational publisher in the East and Central Africa region, specializing in school textbooks and reference works. It is a branch of the International Division of Oxford University Press.

Avallain is a world leader in the provision of educational technology. Co-founded by Ursula Suter in 2002, it has provided consultancy and online tools to governments, corporations, educational publishers and institutions around the globe. Avallain’s subsidiary in Nairobi, Kenya has produced a range of groundbreaking educational products for the local education system.

In collaboration with Avallain, University of Dayton Publishing (UDP) operates UDP Access, a state of the art learning management system that adapts to the real-life circumstances of students and teachers in Central and South America.

UDP Access overflows with the stimulating learning content that you would expect from a creative initiative involving an innovative publisher and Avallain: enhanced digital books, unique digital readers, online projects and, of course, hundreds of interactive activities enriched with diverse media and great design. But what makes this environment even more exceptional is its accessibility. While UDP Access is fully online, it is also available for download as a companion app for tablets and desktops, so that it may be enjoyed offline.

Lauren Robbins, Director of Publishing and Professional Services ELT at Grupo SM, notes:

Our relationship with Avallain has allowed our digital offer to evolve from simple interactive content, to our own ground breaking platform that supports users both online and – as is still typical in most classrooms – offline. We are delighted to have achieved a suite of digital services that fully supports teachers and learners, without technical distractions or obstacles.

Ursula Suter, Co-Founder of Avallain remarked:

Our engagement in Mexico started in 2013, led by our engaging and exciting work with UDP. Since then, our decision to invest in a local support presence has been vindicated again and again, by our great collaboration with UDP, by the general growth of the digital market in the region, and by the enthusiasm with which creative and targeted solutions are received.

University of Dayton Publishing is a publisher of print and digital ELT/ESL courses and support materials for preschool, primary and secondary schools in Mexico and Latin America. It is the result of the strategic alliance between the University of Dayton – a private university in Dayton, Ohio, USA – and the SM Group.

Are you struggling to publish rich, innovative products to an ever-increasing number of devices? Do you find it a challenge to control costs while maintaining compatibility with thousands of smartphones and tablets? More than ever, digital publishers are facing the risk of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) spiralling out of control and drawing investment away from creative authorship and publishing. With Avallain Author and Unity, you can innovate and keep control at the same time.

Publish once, deploy many times

Modern students and educators expect to learn and teach anywhere and anytime, making the most of the past decade’s explosion in mobile technologies. For publishers and content producers, this is both a commercial opportunity, and a threat. There are new providers and devices appearing for each niche in the marketplace, splintering distribution and pricing models, and creating ever more quality control demands. However, investment budgets for digital publishers do not tend to grow at the same rate.

What is needed is a technology that takes care of compatibility and delivery, and allows digital publishers to stay focused on innovation in content and interfaces. Avallain has spent years researching and innovating in some of the most challenging infrastructure environments, such as Africa, South America – and not least – the still poorly-connected and equipped classrooms in continental Europe. We have delivered digital learning across many technical divides, while keeping a lid on costs. Avallain’s current publishing technologies benefit from all this experience and represent a third generation solution to the “publish once, deploy many times” challenge.

A technology in layers: making the complex, simple.

Avallain Author gives publishers the means to prepare the highest quality learning resources with a customized user experience, then quality check them, and deploy them offline and online to desktops, tablets and smartphone apps. These apps may be either standalone offerings like the Award Winning Mazes for Richmond (Santillana), or integrated within the Avallain Unity learning platform as a standard companion app, as in UDP Access environment created for the University of Dayton Publishing (Grupo SM). Content generated in Avallain Author may also be published in standard formats into third party applications.

To enable publishers to author and QA once and deploy many times, Avallain’s technical architecture separates the presentation, interaction and communication features of the content from the destination environment and the native code needed for each situation. xAPI (TinCan) communication is employed to allow seamless synchronization between the devices and platforms and data warehouses. The underlying cross-platform technology is one of the current leading industry standards. It operates on existing and forthcoming devices, such as Raspberry Pi and Automobile Dashboard systems. The architecture works for any type of Avallain Author content, from digital books to collections of simple learning objects, to more complex, bespoke creations like the Richmond Mazes.

Cost-effective, stimulating learning – whatever the device

Developing and maintaining learning applications across the expanding technology landscape, while keeping control of cost and quality, is perhaps the single greatest commercial challenge faced by digital publishers. Avallain is the ideal partner to help you meet that challenge. Already, many of the world’s leading educational publishers and institutions are using Avallain Author to save time and money. And that is time and money that they are now able to spend doing what they do best: creating a viable, differentiated and stimulating learning experience – whatever the device.