The "Miniaturization of Learning" in the Education Market
/We recently spoke with Publishers Weekly about current trends in the educational publishing market. Following are some highlights from the interview:
The “miniaturization of learning” in the education market is becoming obvious as students need quick hits of concepts rather than long, unwieldy lessons, says Waseem Andrabi, senior director of global content services at Cenveo Publisher Services. The Cenveo team, in addition to building complete courses, has been partnering with publishers and content-centric organizations to create specific digital assets—animations, games, and interactives—that aid students in learning concepts quickly. “We are able to create and structure content for adaptive engines that provide robust personalized learning paths, feedback, and performance evaluation,” explains Andrabi, who is seeing authoring and publishing platforms becoming more mature, both off-the-shelf platforms such as Habitat and Aquafa-das, and proprietary ones such as McGraw-Hill Education’s LearnSmart and Cengage Learning’s MindTap.
“We create courses and assets that are technology- and platform-agnostic. Our team of developers, subject matter experts, and instructional designers are fluent across multiple languages, disciplines, and platforms. We closely monitor market trends and situations that impact e-learning and delivery, such as the battle among Apple, Google, and Microsoft for dominance in the class-room-learning ecosystem,” adds Andrabi, whose team also helps guide publishers in the evolving landscape by paying close attention to news in the device world, such as the rise of Chromebook against tablets.
Adaptive learning, Andrabi says, is already transitioning from being a fad to becoming a fact. “We expect technologies such as virtual and augmented reality to make more frequent appearances,” he adds. “In fact, we are seeing this in a number of projects we are working on, including a pre-K-12 social studies program that offers 3 60-degree videos of historical places such as the Roman Colosseum to augment the course content.” Testing and assessment, Andrabi points out, “are ripe for disruption because formats such as multiple choice and fill in the blank have not changed significantly over the years.”
Meanwhile, security is becoming “more important than ever to publishers as e-learning becomes ubiquitous in the classroom,” says marketing director Marianne Calilhanna. “Fortunately, today’s digital learning content is hosted behind secure, access-controlled systems, and the playback of content is not easy to replicate or copy.”
“It is an exciting time to be in the digital education landscape, and we are thrilled with the relationships that we have with well-established publishers and new niche content providers,” Calilhanna says. “In the last three years, digital learning in the education market has made enormous strides. Our team has transformed static, template-driven read-and-interact lessons to sophisticated interventions such as games, simulations, virtual labs, and multimedia. As a full-service, technology-driven partner for digital content creation and transformative publishing solutions, we have logged several thousand hours of content created from scratch and successfully delivered.”
Frankfurt Update: Game Planning in the Digital Solutions Industry
The full article and more can be found in Publishers Weekly Show Daily for day 1 at the Frankfurt Book Fair (click here) or click below
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