Category: Avallain Author

As the needs of learners and teachers change and evolve, so does the authoring tool used to meet these needs. With the rollout of Avallain Author version 4.5, we have once again listened closely to the wishes and suggestions of our customers, which were loud and clear: Even more options for gamification and digital mathematics, more streamlining and better scaling of production processes. Thus, version 4.5 is all about increasing options for content creators, while simultaneously offering a user experience that is better than ever.

New Activity Type: Catch

This new Activity Type allows our customers to create tasks in which learners have to catch moving objects on the screen. This can be used for tasks where learners have to identify and catch multiple correct answers to a question – or to add a spin to the traditional multiple-choice formula. One way or another, Catch gives content creators another tool to bring gamification elements into their learning materials, encouraging users to employ a self-directed approach to solve meaningful tasks in an effort to elicit intrinsic motivation in learners.

New Activity Type: Maths

Expanding the capabilities of Avallain Author further into the realm of mathematics, the new Activity Type Maths gives content creators the tools necessary to add more numeracy tasks to their Learning Objects. After number pyramids and number beams, version 4.5 adds equations and word problems, opening up the potential scope of learning content immensely.

Enhanced Bookmaker functionality

Version 4.5 also includes several enhancements to the Bookmaker, Avallain Author’s integrated editor for creating interactive digital books:

• Double-click anywhere to create fully customisable hotspots such as animations, videos or audios.
• Avoid accidentally deleting hotspots thanks to new confirmation dialog.
• Previews always open on the currently edited page.Preview and save buttons are always available as floating buttons.
• Warning when closing Bookmaker with unsaved changes.

These enhancements make all aspects of digital book production in the Bookmaker quicker and significantly more efficient.

Exporting video files in various formats

When exporting videos into offline files, content creators can now choose which file format they wish the file to be saved in. Avallain Author version 4.5 includes the most common video formats – MP4 and WEBM (and accordingly MP3 and OGG for audio files). Thus, videos can now be exported directly into their intended file formats, eliminating the time requirement, disc space usage and loss of video quality associated with re-encoding.

Additions to copy LO function

With the new version of the authoring tool, content creators can now easily copy and paste entire Learning Objects multiple times. This significantly speeds up production time, as LOs can be used as templates when creating and editing multiple similarly structured Learning Objects.

Continuous Enhancement

Together with a number of smaller new features such as the ability to output mathematical formulae as MathML files, circular hotspot areas and a convenient internet connection check function when creating LOs, the new features and enhancements of Avallain Author 4.5 mark the most advanced version of our authoring tool yet. But developing the software is a continuous process.

As Max Bondi, Product Manager for Avallain Author, puts it:

We are keen to see the various inventive ways our customers will use these latest features so we can use their input to further enhance future versions of the software. Like them, we are already looking forward to the rollout of the next version in 12 weeks.

For over 15 years, Avallain Author has been one of the world’s premiere authoring tools for digital educational media – thanks in large part to continuous upgrades based on the direct feedback we receive from our customers.

As Max Bondi, Product Manager of Avallain Author puts it:

By listening to our customers, we are able to offer them the technology and functionality they need to turn digital education into the most effective, individualised and exciting learning experience their user base could possibly engage in.

To this end, Avallain Author version 4.4 offers four all-new features, further increasing our customers’ options when creating learning materials.

Randomised Learning Objects

To ensure proper learning success, it is important to help learners fully understand tasks and find correct solutions instead of simply recognising patterns in successive tasks. Thus, Avallain Author version 4.4 offers the ability to randomise the order of individual Learning Activities within Learning Objects. This is particularly useful during revision, preventing learners from consciously or subconsciously following patterns to solve tasks, while also providing for an engaging and fresh learning experience every time.

Solution view

Avallain Author version 4.4 now gives the option to let end users toggle between book pages and corresponding solutions pages. This is particularly useful when used within a classroom environment. In conjunction with smartboards or individual digital workstations, it improves classroom management, allowing teachers to give immediate feedback to learner input by quickly switching between task and solutions pages.

Solution hotspot

When revising individually, learners do not need the solutions to an entire book page all at once – sometimes, all they need to succeed is a nudge in the right direction. Thus, we have also implemented a new type of hotspot which can be used in digital books to reveal solutions gradually. This gives learners the option to gain just enough information to be able to prevent stagnation and finish the rest of the Learning Activity by themselves.

Display copyright

Our customers now have the ability to store custom copyright information against assets in the media library. End users can then be given the option of displaying this information by clicking a button, enabling content creators to use legally acquired media from a variety of sources without fear of copyright issues. This allows them to significantly increase the variety of media within their media libraries without incurring the additional costs of producing media content themselves. Also, since this functionality is integrated seamlessly into Learning Activities, it does not interfere with the actual learning experience in any way.

And that’s not all

We will continue to listen, and to add new functionality to Avallain Author according to the wishes of our customers – in fact, the next update is less than 12 weeks away. Until then, we are eager to see how our customers will implement the new features introduced in Avallain Author version 4.4 to make their users’ learning experience as exciting and effective as it should be.

The Bavarian school system is set to shift from its 8-year advanced secondary school model back to a 9-year model by September 2018. The state will also introduce a new curriculum, LehrplanPLUS, which had already been introduced in primary schools in 2014 and will be implemented in secondary education institutions starting Summer 2017.

Notably, this curriculum has been adapted to fit the needs of the modern digital world. To meet these new requirements, Cornelsen – one of the leading publishers of educational media in the German-speaking world for over 70 years – trusts in Avallain Author.

The focus of LehrplanPLUS

One important goal of the new curriculum is to implement the most recent educational guidelines set forth by the assembly of ministers of education of the German federal states. The changes to both Bavaria’s educational mandate and the goals of the curriculum are heavily focused on modernisation:

• Supporting individual learning in heterogeneous classes
• Imparting both knowledge and skills
• Providing media education

LehrplanPLUS acknowledges that modern learning groups are composed of students whose performance, personal interests and needs may differ significantly. Thus, one stated goal of the new curriculum is to provide individualised education to all students in a diverse learning environment.

The education that students will receive focuses on imparting knowledge as well as skills – Students are expected to not only learn facts but to develop disciplinary and cross-disciplinary abilities as well. For example, they should not only learn when the Battle of Waterloo took place, but also gain the competence to independently research and assess the reliability of such information.

Notably, LehrplanPLUS defines media know-how as a cross-disciplinary skill. Thus, engaging with digital media is considered a skill which can not only be used as the subject of entire classes but one which can also be taught by actively using digital media in school. The Bavarian education ministry has created an incentive to use digital learning materials as an integral part of school education.

Ready for LehrplanPLUS with Avallain Author

A call for teaching materials that relevantly use digital media, imparting both knowledge and digital media skills – at the same time and in a fully individualised manner? For Cornelsen, satisfying all of these requirements as soon as LehrplanPLUS comes in effect is no problem at all.

After all, they are using Avallain Author. Cornelsen’s interactive learning tasks are already up to the challenge as, thanks to the powerful authoring tool, learners have the choice of accessing the tasks either via Scook or through the respective apps and CDs.

With the reform of the Bavarian school curriculum, it has become evident once again that planning for the future pays off”, knows Sandra Hestermann, Senior Product Manager at Cornelsen.

We have started cooperating with Avallain early on to be able to offer digital learning tasks as soon as needed – tasks which are not only easy to integrate into Scook but are also didactically valuable and simply fun for the students”, she says.

As a learning platform designed to be used alongside course materials, Scook offers interactive learning tasks designed using Avallain Author to function as digital additions to printed Cornelsen schoolbooks. The result is well worth viewing (Video), as the numerous features of the program fulfil all requirements of LehrplanPLUS.

Supporting students individually

Avallain Author allows Cornelsen to create learning activities which are perfectly adapted to the abilities and needs of students. Thus, Scook can provide its tasks with multiple degrees of difficulty to choose from, according to student performance. Individual feedback and assistance features are also integral to Avallain Author, allowing students in heterogeneous class environments support on an individual basis.

Imparting knowledge and skills

With Avallain Author, Cornelsen has access to a powerful tool which allows them to take full advantage of the possibilities of digital education. The program not only allows the creation of all-new types of tasks, but it also offers more than 100 standard activity types that can be combined into endlessly varied complex tasks. Thus, Scook can merge Drag-and-Drop, Multiple-Choice and interactive speech elements into sophisticated chains of learning activities. This not only allows Scook to impart knowledge and skills – but the entire learning process is also more exciting for the students.

Training digital media skills

Avallain Author follows an object-oriented approach, which means that learning content is independent of its technological realisation. This gives Cornelsen the freedom to update the technology behind Scook at any time without having to edit the learning content as well. For students, the object-based approach means that they can work on their interactive learning tasks on various devices, from desktop computers to smartphones, experiencing a variety of digital media in a safe environment.

Cornelsen and Avallain – ready for the future

With its focus on digital education, LehrplanPLUS brings the Bavarian educational system up to date. Publishers who have not invested in the digital sphere early now need to put in a lot of effort or risk being left behind by technological progress. Cornelsen, however, can look forward to the future, as Avallain Author is continually being developed further using highly advanced and sophisticated technologies.

The German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) has officially approved the German Adult Education Association’s (DVV) free adult education platform Ich-will-Deutsch-lernen.de (iwdl.de) for use in immigrant integration courses. It is the first ever digital learning tool to be officially approved by the agency. The platform, which has been created using Avallain Author and the Avallain platform architecture, can now be used as a blended learning tool for the courses.

Flexible learning paths for German as a second language

The educational platform iwdl.de transposes the German integration course curriculum into a digital learning environment. To support the integration of immigrants into German society both in terms of language and culture, iwdl.de offers more than 11’500 exercises in various areas of learning:

• 4’500 different language exercises which guide learners from proficiency level A1 (beginner) to B1 (intermediate language use).
• A learning area focusing on German as a second language literacy skills, expanding the level A1 language course with exercises that focus on acquiring written language skills.
• 30 comprehensive scenarios for occupational language learning, encompassing exercises that increase occupational language skills up to level B2 (upper intermediate).

Whenever possible, the Avallain Author created learning content is combined with multimedia elements such as videos or audio exercises. To navigate the content, learners can use an interactive board game-like learning map illustrating their learning path.

The structure of iwdl.de is based on the Avallain platform architecture, which allows learners to choose exercises based on their own interests as well as their learning progress. Meanwhile, their DVV tutors can supervise everything digitally, giving individual feedback and help when needed. This allows the tool to be used both to provide a foundation for individualised learning within heterogeneous groups and to support independent learning efforts.

After one-and-a-half years of use and great success by four German adult education centres, BAMF has officially approved iwdl.de starting 1st of May 2017. This makes it the first ever digital learning tool to be officially approved by BAMF as a fundamental learning tool for immigrant integration courses.

With reference to:
https://www.dvv-vhs.de/presse/details/news/detail/News/erstes-digitales-lehrwerk-fuer-integrationskurse-zugelassen.html
https://portal-deutsch.de/unterrichten/deutsch-unterrichten/ich-will-deutsch-lernen/

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.

Each year, up to 700 students begin their medical careers at the prestigious Charité University of Medicine Berlin, one of the largest university hospitals in Europe. Charité has produced over half of the German Nobel Laureates for medicine and physiology since the prize’s inception.

Every autumn term, high school graduates come to this world-renowned campus from all over the world, and although they all have a history of excellent grades in common, they start their semesters with very different levels of relevant background knowledge.

A Bridge Course created with Avallain Author to overcome different knowledge levels

In order to balance out these differences in knowledge and to prepare international students for the requirements of their medical studies, in 2013, the Charité Dean’s Office for Education and Teaching piloted the Bridge Course, a cutting-edge project developed with Avallain Author.

The course provided students with the opportunity to evaluate their knowledge through graded tests for various basic subjects such as biology, chemistry, physics, anatomy and histology. In addition to that, it offered online content integrated with face to face student-led tutorials in a blended learning format. In this way, the Bridge Course pilot combined the benefits and flexibility of studying online along with those of peer-assisted learning (PAL).

Peer-assisted learning: learning with and from each other

We understand peer-assisted learning to mean collegial learning with and by peers in which students are enabled by their shared social and cognitive backgrounds to engage in meaningful, participative learning. To this end, online tutorials within the pilot maintained an informal educational environment.

Peer-assisted learning should benefit all those taking part — whether they are sharing knowledge or receiving it. Participants in the Bridge Course pilot benefitted mutually either by developing their own skills through creating and preparing their own teaching materials for their colleagues, or by improving their abilities in assimilating and summarising information, anticipating their colleagues’ potential questions and offering answers in an erudite yet understandable manner. Therefore, the course provided all students with the prospect of greatly enhancing their professional competence and communication skills.

Wanted: A user-friendly authoring system that supports students’ individual needs through PAL

As both peers and online tutors, the students had to create teaching and learning materials, thus becoming active authors. For that reason, choosing the right authoring tool was highly important in the Bridge Course pilot; it would contribute significantly to the success of PAL.

From the outset of the pilot, Charité was looking for an authoring system that would:

• Be user-friendly and therefore would require only basic initial training.
• Enable users to create and customise content quickly.
• Offer a variety of capabilities for personalisation.
• Provide high quality visual content, despite having been written by various authors.

The Charité project team evaluated a wide range of authoring systems and opted for Avallain Author. As a local integrator for Avallain, EDU-Werkstatt GmbH, based in Berlin, took over the technical support of the project on-site.

Jan David Gerken, the student coordinator for the project, stated: 

The core question of how to facilitate the most efficient learning for students and teachers is linked to how knowledge is transferred through online preparation or follow-up courses, in order to make the presencial element as useful and practical as possible. This requires a powerful authoring tool, such as Avallain Author, which is of the highest quality and enables even the most complex learning content to be implemented interactively.

Over 80% utilisation rate: Avallain Author for PAL usage

The Bridge Course pilot was a resounding achievement. It was implemented successfully within the given budget and time limits. The students were enthusiastic about the quality of the learning opportunities provided through the courses and, consequently, the utilisation rate was 83.9% of registered learners.

Ignatz Heinz, co-founder and Managing Director of Avallain, is satisfied with these positive results: 

This confirms that Avallain Author can be tailored according to the individuality of students and thus successfully supports peer-assisted learning. Without programming knowledge and with only a short training period, high-quality learning and teaching materials were created, and the students were able to quickly and effectively make their own knowledge available to other scholars.

Pearson has deployed Avallain Author to prepare a new wave of learning resources for Poptropica English, a vibrant blended learning program based on the online gaming environment, Poptropica.

Poptropica English, a powerful blend of stimulating and rigorous learning content

Launched this year in China and other key markets, Poptropica English features an all-new range of stunning digital content, including varied interactions, quests, games, songs and other media. The resources are fully blended with a ground breaking, six-level primary course based on the children’s gaming phenomenon, Poptropica.

The game’s characters, narratives and settings are used throughout Poptropica English to achieve new heights of engagement and motivation. The seamlessly-integrated learning resources from Avallain Author, encourage students to practice and develop their language skills and support them in their learning. The result is a truly child-centred experience, driven by the individual’s excitement, interest, and pace of learning. Teachers are supported too by Poptropica English’s teaching tools, and enhanced data collection and analysis, which allows them to monitor their students’ progress, and develop personalized learning journeys.

Matthew Dickin, Content Design and Production Director at Pearson, commented:

Poptropica English is a powerful blend of stimulating and rigorous learning content, effective tools for students and teachers, and the excitement, engagement and motivation of a great gaming environment. The result is a rich and rewarding program, delivered across media and devices, offering students and teachers a flexible, exciting way to learn and teach. We have been very excited by early responses from learners and educators, and we look forward to sharing Poptropica English ever more widely in the months and years to come.

A learning program that succeeds at challenging boundaries

Ignatz Heinz, Managing Director of Avallain, said:

We are truly delighted to be involved in a project that so successfully challenges boundaries between class and home-based learning, between print and digital, and between gaming and education. And we are proud, too, of the collaboration with Pearson. The initial rollout took just nine months, which is testimony to the strength of the partnership, the supreme efforts of the Pearson author team, and the versatility and efficiency of the Avallain Author platform.

Pearson is the world’s learning company, with expertise in educational courseware and assessment, and a range of teaching and learning services powered by technology. More than 1.5 million teachers and 33 million students use Pearson’s English language learning resources and tools each year.

The story of Avallain Author is our story. Pioneering, empowering, and founded upon the best education design, Author is one of our defining technologies. Its story shows how we have always been ahead of the wave, pre-empting developments in educational technology, devising tools that will drive the learning of tomorrow. To know that story is to know Avallain. And so here it is: the story of Author, right up to the latest, groundbreaking innovation.

A perfect balance of education and technology

In 1996, we set out to create the first online digital authoring tool. Our aim was a solution that avoided the technology fixations of the time, and instead, placed sound education design at its heart. To achieve this, we worked with dedicated education designers, whose sole task was to ensure quality of design and pedagogy. Outstanding technology was fundamental too, of course, and the finest engineers were set to work; but crucially, design and engineering remained separate streams, ensuring that neither compromised the other.

It was a process driven by ideas, but also by experience. Most of the inspiration came from our clients and collaborators: teachers, publishers, authors and educators who live and breathe education. To this day, their contributions underpin every principle and feature of Author.

Smart architecture: building for the future

Avallain was founded in 2002 to focus on publishing solutions, and on a new generation of the authoring tool: Avallain Author. Harnessing all of our insights, the all-new Author was engineered for the future.

We made use of an object-oriented approach and separated the content from its presentation, ensuring that it would weather the storms of technological change. This architecture has seen Author – and its content creations – through seismic shifts such as HTML to Flash, Flash to HTML5, and the explosion of mobile devices. In a world of ever more interoperability, thought was given not only to emerging (now, established) standards, but also to interfacing with other systems. This has opened the way to many cutting-edge collaborations, including those with specialized solutions for specific subjects, such as GeoGebra, and more recently, with Seinet’s content management system, enabling blended publishing to print and digital.

In these ways, our future-proofed approach has shielded our clients from substantial cost and disruption, and allowed them to focus instead on creativity and authorship.

Gamification, adaptive learning, APIs: evolving for the demands of tomorrow

This year may mark two decades of our research and development in the field of digital authoring, but Author is not about the past, it is about the future. Its firm but flexible foundations allow it to evolve in response to ever-changing demands and opportunities. Here are just some of the latest innovations:

• Gamification: activities can now be transformed into exciting team competitions, with automatic marking and scoreboard updates.
• Unique activity types: we are always adding new activity types and features, often in response to suggestions from clients. In the past 6 months alone, we have added 30 features and 10 activity types.
• Digital books: professional on-screen books can now be created directly in Author, and enriched with embedded audio, video and activities.
• Maze reader creation: these acclaimed scenario-based readers encourage learners to follow their own path through a story, and test their knowledge of English as they go. The first maze reader won the most prestigious innovation prize in English Language Teaching: the ESU President’s Award.
• Adaptive learning: it is now possible to craft adaptive learning paths suited to the unique needs of individual learners, promoting engagement and motivation, and enhancing outcomes.
• Advanced workflow management: Avallain Author now supports seven roles in the publishing workflow, providing sufficient flexibility and control to manage complex publishing workflows.
• API: it is now possible to reach directly into the data of Avallain Author. Information about users, projects, work packages and learning objects may be retrieved, interrogated and archived in other systems, allowing publishers to integrate Author more fully into its workflows. Planned updates will allow publishing too, enabling third party systems to manage the full publishing process.

Avallain Author’s tireless evolution keeps it responsive to current demands, and prepared for the future. And because it is a service, not a software, these innovations are available to all of our clients, seamlessly.

The story of Avallain Author continues apace. Like the inspirational content Author creates, it is the product of great ideas, long experience, and insight.

Join us, and let’s keep writing.

An Avallain-supported English language teaching application has won the English-Speaking Union’s top award. Richmond Mazes: Crisis at Clifton is an interactive, graded digital reader focusing on real-life work scenarios.

Richmond International, an Oxford-based English Language Teaching publisher, published the digital edition using Avallain Author software.

“We are delighted that this application was recognized by the ESU’s President’s Award,” said Ignatz Heinz, Avallain MD. “This reader successfully combines innovative software design, scenario-based training principles, and proven English language teaching pedagogy. It maximizes the potential of our learning technology.”

Avallain is an international education technology enterprise with headquarters in Switzerland.

Crisis at Clifton is part of the Richmond Mazes series, available in digital and print formats. The reader is challenged to really comprehend what they have read by being asked to take decisions at the end of each section.

Luke Baxter, Digital Publisher at Richmond explains: “The stories are set in realistic business settings and follow a professional path of someone getting their first proper job to more senior management positions.”

The ESU especially commended the learning application for its use of audio clips, illustrations, and decision trees, which allow students to repeat activities as needed. The ESU is a registered, UK-based charity aiming to empower people of different languages and cultures using English as a common language.