Month: December 2016

Huss Media and Directa Publishing House launch the future of vocational training with Avallain

Posted on by Yerbol Adamov

There is an abundance of specialist journals, textbooks and magazines for trade and industry, their main focus varies and the range is growing steadily. However, the interactive digital content that print publications now offer their readers is brand new: Since September 2016, deduu (digital education utility) – a learning platform with interactive learning modules for various disciplines such as electrical engineering or metal technology – is complementing the specialist magazines published by Huss Media and Directa.

From print to digital content – deduu works as the ‘missing link’

This way Huss Media and Directa Publishing enhance their focus on traditional vocational print magazines and textbooks for the commercial sector, with future-oriented and innovative ways of delivering learning.

Torsten Ernst, Publishing Director of Huss Media GmbH, says:

“With the launch of our deduu project, we managed to bridge the gap between our print content and the digital world. From a publisher’s perspective, this is the missing link all publishers are searching for to enhance their traditional media products with a digital element.”

From the outset, deduu presents itself as a scalable learning platform, aimed at the needs as well as target groups of various customers. Not only does it thereby open a new market sector, but also expands the publisher’s magazine division with innovative offers, thus generating a younger audience. There are, for example, numerous products that enrich the vocational section of various magazines with interactive exercises. Vocational students can thus strengthen their knowledge or prepare for their exams.

From expert to interactive author – Avallain Author as facilitator

The platform technology is based on Moodle, which as an open source learning management system has a large community. The interactive content is developed with Avallain Author, an authoring tool that does not require any programming skills or prolonged training. Avallain Author provides an export of the produced content into the Moodle LMS. In cooperation with EDU-Werkstatt GmbH1, which is part of the d-education GmbH (a consortium of Directa, Huss Media and EDU), Avallain trained numerous authors from various disciplines to enable them to create a new range of digital products. Avallain Author turns print media specialists into authors of interactive learning materials.

Nico Warncke, publishing director of Directa Publishing, underlines the importance of this cooperation:

The advantage for specialist publishers is obvious: In addition to traditional articles in print media, we can now use the knowledge and expertise of our authors for interactive content, since Avallain Author requires minimal training and hardly any existing computer skills. Furthermore, deduu enables us to generate a more versatile publishing range that is better geared towards today’s needs. This allows us to access new markets and more importantly, win new young readers.

In addition to the monthly magazine, readers have access to the electronic learning modules via “my.deduu.de” and can therefore benefit from significant added value:

  • Readers receive feedback on their personal knowledge
  • In addition to the solution itself, the approach as well as background knowledge is explained
  • The product range is always up-to-date and grows over time
  • The user can try out different learning scenarios
  • There are tests to help with exam preparation
  • The product range is tailored to a target group that is mobile and lives and learns in a digital way
  • It can be used on all digital platforms (PC, tablets, smartphones)
  • Learning on the go using mobile devices is also supported

The move of specialist publishers towards digital education content

Going forward, the publishing range of deduu will be constantly expanded with new disciplines and areas of learning. This year will still see the launch of new products that help students prepare for exams.

Ignatz Heinz, Managing Director of Avallain, is pleased about the successful cooperation:

To make a contribution to vocational training programs and to accompany specialist publishers on their way to a digital education, is a great step towards new learning opportunities and pioneering vocational training developments. We look forward to see what customized interactive content will be built with Avallain Author next.

In January 2017, the new continuing learning opportunity “Modern metal technology” will be launched. It is aimed at vocational students and working professionals in all metalworking vocations and designed to help them prepare for their exams. This takes Avallain’s contribution in optimizing professional education materials and reaching a wider and younger audience one step further.

1 The EDU-Werkstatt GmbH is a young company that was established in 2012 and specializes in digital educational media; www.edu-werkstatt.de

Diversity through unity: digital education, delivered by Avallain Unity

Posted on by Yerbol Adamov

Learning has never been more diverse. The digital revolution has forged new media, new content types, new ways to organise and monitor learning. It has given rise to new learning methodologies such as differentiated and personalised learning. It has freed us to learn and teach on a range of new devices, and thereby shift the boundaries of the classroom in new and exciting ways.

This diversity offers an unprecedented opportunity to meet the specific needs of learners and teachers. But it is also a very real challenge for those delivering education. Diversity breeds complexity, and that complexity can be hard to control. That is why we have spent the past two decades developing Avallain Unity.

Avallain Unity is true to its name. It creates diversity out of unity. It delivers powerful, flexible learning for all contexts, based not on a single technology, but on a union of the best technologies in digital education, working in a single, coherent ecosystem.

So where did it come from, and how does it work?

The vision for digital education: tools to collaborate and manage learning

In 1997 we developed our first Learning Content Management System (LCMS), long before the term became widely recognized. This enabled our clients to create and manage large numbers of learning objects, and gather them into collections as lessons or courses. But this was a starting point and not an end. Publishers, institutions and teachers needed flexible tools to publish and manage multiple lessons and courses, in a user-friendly environment, and then track and support the activity of learners. To achieve this in a way that was meaningful, we needed to study learning paradigms, and the interplay between the stakeholders in education, and then provide effective tools to move them online.

Of course we were not alone in our ambitions. At around the same time, other providers emerged from higher education with technology based on ERP (Enterprise Resource Management). But ERP was conceived to collect, manage and interpret data, not as a basis for learning, and so often interfaces were dry and functional, structures rigid, and the user experience complex. The open source movement also produced powerful platforms, which made learning management technology more widely accessible, and quicker to evolve. But these are hard to customise without losing central support – one of the principal advantages of any third party system.

In each of these cases, educators often faced difficulties adapting the tools to their diverse needs. All too often, the learning was forced to adapt to the technology, rather than the other way around.

Learning management, done differently

We knew we had to do something new. Our years of work with many different learning providers had taught us several things about digital education:

  1. It’s all about the learning. Technology, however bold and innovative, is only useful if it supports learning experiences and outcomes. To achieve this education focus within technology, we would have to find a new skill set, which we called education design. As early as the 1990s, we became the first to develop a dedicated role for digital education designers.
  2. It’s not the same for everyone. Learning – and particularly digital learning – is a very different prospect for different types of learners, teachers and institutions. Our solution would need to be architected to support diversity.
  3. Things change, and quickly. Any technology of this ambition would go through a great deal of evolutionary change. Underlying technologies would come and go, and our architecture would need to be robust and flexible to allow that to happen.

Best-of-breed technologies, blended

With these as our founding principles, we set about developing Avallain Unity. We adopted a modular, object-oriented architecture, which would give us the flexibility to adapt to customer needs and technological change without difficulty. We separated presentation, features and content, so that we could innovate in one area without reinventing the others. Then we began drawing together best-of-breed technologies that we judged to offer learners, teachers, institutions and publishers the very best educational possibilities. In this way, we offer our clients early, low-risk access to technologies that have since become fundamental to the industry, such as:

  • WCMS (Web Content Management Systems): tools that allow teachers, institutions and publishers to control how their platform is presented, without the need of programmers or additional marketing systems.
  • Gamified accessways: interfaces that use the engaging, motivating features of gaming to facilitate and encourage learning.
  • Cloud-native architecture: Avallain Unity was designed from the outset with a cloud computing architecture that simplifies delivery and enables mobile learning.
  • Ruby on Rails: the elegant and solid framework for responsiveness and flexibility. As early adopters, we were able to lead while the majority of EdTech startups followed.
  • xAPI: a specification for a common language to capture the actions and achievements of learners, wherever they are learning, on whatever device.
  • LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability): a set of specifications that allow our technology to communicate or integrate with third party tools or educational platforms.
  • eCommerce: the facility to manage financial transactions, including facilities for flexible pricing, upgrades and in-app purchasing.

All the while, we have kept that all-important focus on learning by ensuring that our education designers and our clients lead each new phase of development. This means we capture what works, while avoiding some of the technology fixations we see elsewhere in the industry. If it doesn’t work for students, teachers and institutions, it doesn’t make it into Avallain Unity.

But the innovation continues. One technology we are working with now, for instance, is a solution to manage and interpret the vast quantities of complex user data generated by our learning platforms and content. We are deploying business intelligence and data warehousing technologies like Amazon Elastic MapReduce and MetaBase BI to analyze this data more quickly, and to deliver ever more powerful insights. These insights will help students to learn and teachers to teach through personalized and differentiated learning, but they will also help Avallain and our clients, because they will inform the developments of the future.

30 platforms, 150 countries, 15 million learners

Avallain Unity’s flexible approach to technology has enabled us to deliver more than 30 groundbreaking learning platforms to more than 15 million students, in radically different educational contexts all over the world. Some of the many learning programmes delivered by Avallain Unity are:

  • Adult literacy programmes in Africa and Europe
  • Language teaching with Pearson, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Cornelsen, Difusion and Macmillan
  • Primary and secondary curriculum education in places as contrasting as Germany and Mexico, Kenya and the UK
  • Integration education to support more than a million recent immigrants to Germany

But however many the applications of Avallain Unity, the platform remains true to its founding vision: a union of technologies that truly work for education, delivered flexibly to support a diverse and changing learning landscape.

Diversity through unity. After nearly twenty years, we know it is a vision that works, and we’re excited about where it will take us next.

Gamification with Avallain: points are really not the point

Posted on by Yerbol Adamov

The concept of gamification may have been around since as early as the 6th century BCE – when military leaders in ancient China practised strategy with the game Go1 – but the term gamification itself wasn’t coined until 2003. Since that time, it has most often been used to refer to the process of applying game-based thinking and techniques to otherwise non-game situations, particularly in the fields of technology and edtech. Some consider applied gaming and gameful design to be synonyms of gamification.

The gamification process often results in serious games, which are not called serious because they lack fun. On the contrary, many serious games are great fun, but fun and entertainment are not their primary purpose. Instead, serious games aim to precipitate changes in learners in anything from skills and knowledge to health and wellbeing.2 In serious games, game techniques are applied to content to engage learners, and intrinsic motivation is elicited to spur sustained change.

What drives intrinsic motivation? Not points.

Intrinsic motivation is driven by “autonomy, mastery and purpose” (Pink, 2011): learners want to self-direct their learning; improve their knowledge and skills; and learn about and do meaningful things.3 Well-designed serious games allow learners to do all of those things, all without fear of failure or embarrassment. They also help avoid or decrease many of the time, cost, safety and organisational constraints often involved with learning and training.

There is some belief that simply adding a system of points or rewards to a product will gamify it, but we believe this is a trivialisation of gamification. Some experts refer to this process as “pointification” and don’t consider it gamification at all. Additionally, some research shows that incorporating only extrinsic motivators such as points can actually detract from learning and motivation.3 In order to develop intrinsically valuable gamified products, content must be gamified by mindfully incorporating game elements such as characters, stories, challenges and levels to predetermined learning objectives.4

Intrinsically motivating and award-winning: gamification at Avallain

Avallain Author and Avallain Unity give our clients the opportunity to gamify content by incorporating these and other game elements into their products. Pearson, for example, used Avallain Author to create rich interactive digital content including quests, games and songs for the language-learning adventure game, Poptropica English. Richmond, another of our clients, used Author to create Spiral, a virtual learning environment packed with interactive activities, games, cartoons and animated stories. And Oxford University Press has been using Avallain Author and Avallain Unity to create and support Oxford Owl, an award-winning learning management system that offers gamified educational content for both students and parents. All three of these serious game projects incorporate intrinsic motivators and engage learners with fun game-based activities.

We also collaborated with Deutscher Volkshochschulverband, the German Adult Education Association, to produce ich-will-lernen.de, a story-based, levelled game that teaches basic skills in German, English and maths. The content was gamified into a digital board game with levels that the learner must work through in order to help a character solve challenges. The addition of game elements to the educational content has proved highly successful in engaging learners, and the project has won multiple awards.

Putting game elements to work; playing to learn on the job

Gamifying since before the term gamification was coined, we’ve had experience adding game elements not just to educational content, but to hands-on job training content, as well. For instance, with Elsevier and Nestlé, we created scenario games, also known as story-based games, for teaching and training employees. For Elsevier, we created a scenario game that trains learners to administer ultrasound scans, and for Nestlé, we created a scenario game that allows workers to virtually tour and learn about factories and procedures. Both games elicit intrinsic motivation by giving employees the chance to self-direct, learn at their own pace, practise without fear and succeed in a virtual version of their workplace before having to actually perform tasks on the job. Additionally, game elements such as characters, stories and quizzes engage the learners and make the learning experience more accessible and enjoyable.

Gamification tools tailored to fit your educational design

Avallain Author and Avallain Unity support creativity and intrinsically motivated learning by offering authors much more than just a simple list of features like points, levels or time limits. With our tools, authors can add game elements to their content based on their own educational objectives instead of having to adapt their objectives to fit the tools. Our gamification technology is designed to be easy to use and customise, saving our clients time and money while still allowing their creativity to flourish. We tailor the technology to fit the concept, and not the other way round.

1 Deterding, Christoph Sebastian (2016). Make-Believe in Gameful and Playful Design. In: Digital Make-Believe. Human-Computer Interaction. Basel, Switzerland: Springer. pp 101-124http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/100127/1/Deterding_2016_Make_Believe_Gameful_Playful_Design.pdf

Halter, Ed. (June, 2006) From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games. New York New York: PublicAffairs.

2 McCallum, Simon (2012). Gamification and Serious Games for Personalized Health.http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.465.3239&rep=rep1&type=pdf (pg 86-87)

3 Pink, Daniel H. (2011) Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Riverhead Books.

Wikipedia (2016). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_About_What_Motivates_Us Accessed Oct-Nov 2016.

4 Kapp, Karl (2012). Future of Learning: Games and Gamification. Slideshare.http://www.slideshare.net/kkapp/future-of-learning-games-and-gamification Accessed Oct-Nov 2016.

Marczewski, Andrzej. (2012). Gamification and stuff. Slideshare.http://www.slideshare.net/daverage/gamification-and-stuff Accessed Oct-Nov 2016.

Kapp, Karl M. (2012). The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.

Walz, Steffen P. & Deterding, Sebastian (2015). The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Zac Fitz-Walter. A brief history of gamification. http://zefcan.com/2013/01/a-brief-history-of-gamification/Accessed 24 Oct. 2016.

Dichev, Christo; Dicheva, Darina; Angelova, Galia; Agre, Gennady (2014). From Gamification to Gameful Design and Gameful Experience in Learning. In: Cybernetics and Information Technologies, Vol. 14, No. 4. Sofia, Bulgaria: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. pp 80-100 http://www.cit.iit.bas.bg/CIT_2014/v14-4/7-15-CIT2014-Dichev%20_1_-m-Gotovo.pdf

Sitzmann, Traci. A Meta-Analytic Examination of the Instructional Effectiveness of Computer-Based Simulation Games. University of Colorado Denver. In press at Personnel Psychology.http://www.ucdenver.edu/academics/colleges/business/about/Faculty-Research/workingPapers/test/Sitzmann_Traci_Simulation%20Games%20Meta-Analysis.pdf

Avallain Author delivers a new wave of premium digital content for Cambridge University Press

Posted on by Yerbol Adamov

Following a successful one-year rollout at the globally-renowned educational publisher Cambridge University Press (CUP), Avallain Author has become the ELT division’s central production system for interactive learning content, and delivered no fewer than 5,000 learning objects for a range of products.

The extensive collaboration involved integrating Avallain Author content with CUP’s industry-leading digital platform the ‘Cambridge Learning Management System’. Avallain and Cambridge are now pressing ahead with new content formats to support learners and teachers, including advanced digital books.

Alice Fleet, Technology Director for ELT, Cambridge University Press, said:

We are very pleased with the way that Avallain Author has been integrated into our processes, and with the thousands of learning objects it has already generated. We look forward to exploring the next phase of our production strategy with Avallain.”

Ignatz Heinz, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Avallain, commented:

“It has been a pleasure to bring Avallain Author to such an advanced and established digital production team, and to see our tools and processes quickly adopted and making a difference. We are now keen to build on these successes and expand our mutual endeavour.

Cambridge University Press is the world’s oldest media business, established in 1534, and is the publishing arm of the University of Cambridge. Its methods and approaches in the teaching and learning of English reflect the most up-to-date research and international best practice. The company is a leading global educational publisher for schools and colleges, and for the teaching and learning of the English language.

Avallain Author is a flexible and powerful platform for designing, authoring, and efficiently producing interactive educational products. It enables editors and teachers to create highly interactive, rich digital education solutions. Promoting educational design over technology hype, Avallain Author production processes and workflows provide a flexible and robust solution for educational content.