Month: February 2018

Avallain is launching a new strategic proof-of-concept project together with Springer Campus, part of Springer Nature and renowned provider of correspondence courses as well as adult education materials.

Using the powerful and highly flexible authoring tool Avallain Author, the partners will jointly enhance already existing course materials and expand them with contemporary activity types and a modernised design.

An experienced partner for Springer Campus

Springer Campus offers a wide range of correspondence and certificate courses, allowing learners to do anything from attaining a Bachelor’s degree in web and media informatics to becoming a certified junior programmer. All of these courses employ a blended learning approach combining classroom sessions at renowned universities with distance learning and e-learning elements. Thus, they are ideally suited for the educational needs of learners in full-time employment.

“Cooperating with our partners at several renowned universities, we have used this approach to create distance learning courses which combine high-quality materials with an individualised didactic design. With this strategy, we have achieved a particularly high level of participant satisfaction,” says Merlet Behncke-Braunbeck, Executive Editor for correspondence courses and adult education at Springer Campus. “To maintain this high standard of quality, our e-learning solutions use best-of-breed solutions exclusively”, she explains, “and thus, we were immediately impressed by Avallain Author.”

Revised and new content, created with Avallain Author

Avallain Author will be used both for revising already existing materials as well as creating entirely new courses within the e-learning area of Springer Campus’ services. This way, course participants will benefit from all the advantages of the advanced authoring tool:

• Learning materials of the highest technical and didactic quality
• Flexible learning processes and intuitive user interfaces
• Perfect integration of materials into existing e-learning structures

“Alongside its widely-recognised quality, Avallain Author’s openness to imports from existing XML sources were undoubtedly two of the main reasons for the e-learning experts at Springer Campus to choose to work with us,” says Markus Hartmann, Director of Professional Services DACH at Avallain, “though Avallain’s experience and consulting expertise probably also played their part in that decision. As a partner with extensive technological as well as editorial experience, we can react to feedback immediately and adapt Avallain Author to the requirements of Springer Campus at any time.”

Creating the future of distance learning with Springer Campus and Avallain

Course participants will probably notice the results of this proof-of-concept project very soon. Thanks to Avallain Author, the materials available will become more flexible and numerous – without losing the great didactic quality which Springer Campus stands for.

After introducing the Maths Quizzes Activity Type and enhanced feedback options in Avallain Author 4.6, today’s update to Avallain’s comprehensive authoring tool adds new Activity Types and options that put learners into a more proactive role while simultaneously improving mobile device usability. We know from listening to our customers’ feedback that many of them already have great plans for these new features.

Avallain Author 4.7 gives them the tools to provide their learners with the most individualised learning experience yet.

New Activity Types

Dialogue Recording

To allow learners to not only listen to but also produce speech as part of their digital education, Avallain Author 4.7 enhances its audio recording options by adding the ability to create dialogue using recorded speech. Thus, learners can take part in a virtual conversation with a pre-recorded partner, honing their language and social skills in virtual scenarios.

The Dialogue Recording Activity Type allows learners to record, play back and re-record their lines individually, as well as swap roles. In addition, they can play back and download the whole conversation after the recording is completed.

In order to provide even more options to individualise the learning experience, content creator can enable learners to adjust the difficulty level by hiding their lines or all lines.

Proofing

Many learners enjoy being allowed to play the part of teacher themselves. Avallain Author 4.7 introduces a new Activity Type in which users are given a text filled with mistakes that they have to identify, categorise and correct.

As of now, there are 9 categories of errors that learners can be asked to correct:

1. Capitalize
2. Lowercase
3. Add period
4. Insert
5. Remove
6. New paragraph
7. Spelling
8. Grammar
9. Indent

The total number of mistakes as well as the number identified so far are displayed to the learner. Thus, learners gain immediate feedback, which has a beneficial effect on their motivation and learning outcome.

New Options

Aside from new Activity Types, Avallain Author 4.7 also introduces various new options for already existing Activity Types, such as:

Gap Behaviour for Drag-and-Drop activities

When it comes to mobile devices, intuitive control schemes are imperative. Thus, we have introduced a new Gap Behaviour Specific Option which makes Drag-and-Drop Activity Types easier to use on touchscreens.

Using the Tap Item Behaviour, learners can simply tap on an item to automatically put it into the first free slot in the target area.

Using the Tap Target Behaviour, on the other hand, allows users to tap once on the item to select it and once again on the target area to place it.

Column headings for Linking Lines activities

This is a new option that allows content creators to create individual headings for each column in their Linking Lines activities. This means they can now use Linking Lines activities to explain even more complex topics to learners.

What the future holds for Avallain Author

Aside from these new features, Avallain Author 4.7 also introduces various smaller features such as allowing voice recording on Android and iOS devices. As always, we are confident that our customers will enjoy these new features.

“Avallain Author has gained new features and activities with every single update,” says Max Bondi, Product Manager Avallain Author, “and our customers never cease to amaze us with the creative ways in which they put these features to use. We are sure that this time will be no exception. Let’s see what we can learn from their feedback for Avallain Author 4.8, scheduled for release in only twelve weeks.”