Category: Avallain Author

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.