Getting Real With AI

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Getting Real With AI

During our recent community event, PubFactory Virtual Series: Industry Day, KGL’s Waseem Andrabi, VP of Learning Solutions, presented the different areas where the company is exploring artificial intelligence (AI) in publishing workflows to improve efficiency and reduce errors. Potential applications include content creation, copyediting, plagiarism checks, translations, adaptations, animations, videos, voiceovers, and more.

The session provides insights into the challenges faced, particularly in AI-generated alt text for images where KGL has been testing APIs for over 10 months, with examples that illustrate the evolving capabilities and limitations of AI models. Despite mixed results, Waseem emphasizes the importance of ongoing evaluation and adaptation to leverage AI's potential benefits in various service areas. Watch the recording to learn more.

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Knowledge Sharing: KGL’s Vanessa Vaughn Discusses Content Development, DEI, and the Future of K-12 and Higher Education Publishing

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Knowledge Sharing: KGL’s Vanessa Vaughn Discusses Content Development, DEI, and the Future of K-12 and Higher Education Publishing

Earlier this summer, KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. welcomed Vanessa Vaughn as Senior Director, Content Services in our K-12 and Higher Education group to oversee content development for science and humanities subjects. Vanessa brings to KGL 20 years of experience developing high-quality K-16 content and a deep understanding of changing state and national standards.

Vanessa started her KGL tenure by contributing to the updated edition of our industry report, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Educational Content: What You Need to Know Now. I sat down with her recently to discuss her new role, content DEI in educational publishing, and how she sees the industry changing in the next five years.

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Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Educational Content: What You Need to Know Now

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Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Educational Content: What You Need to Know Now

A free report from KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Over the last decade, in response to a changing, better-informed world, the publishing industry has taken steps to bring more diversity into the workforce as well as to make their content more inclusive. However, those changes have at times been criticized for moving too slowly.

Recent legislation, social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, and global disability rights and transgender equality campaigns have helped accelerate the industry’s desire for equity and better representation for all. As many publishers have seen, though the need and desire to make content and companies more inclusive are there, the path forward on how to implement these changes is not always clear.

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Publishing Predictions for 2023: CDEI, China, Chatbots, and More

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Publishing Predictions for 2023: CDEI, China, Chatbots, and More

Looking to the year ahead once again, the KGL experts across book and journal publishing, scholarly and education markets, technology and business development, weigh in to highlight some of the industry trends we expect will be prominent in 2023. 

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All About the Game: How Gamification Can Improve Engagement and Learning

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All About the Game: How Gamification Can Improve Engagement and Learning

There is no question that technology, particularly in the last two years, has played a large role in the field of education. With remote learning, students and educators were required to become not only familiar but fluent in EdTech. But as we spent more time on screens away from each other, students became less focused. With engagement at an all-time low, teachers did everything they could to get the attention of students, even resorting to employing games in their curricula in order to encourage participation.

Though gamification of learning objectives was around before the pandemic, this teaching method was not used as widely. As teachers tried everything to engage students, they soon found that when they began implementing games in their classwork, students were participating, paying attention, and even learning lessons. Now that students are back in the classroom, will games still be an active part of education?

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Publishing Events Rebound in 2022

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Publishing Events Rebound in 2022

The KGL Team Reflects on a Busy Season of Live Conferences and Book Fairs

We at KGL have been out attending in-person events in force over the past three months for the first time since 2019, including #LBF22, #PCPA2022, #CSE2022, #SSP2022, #AUPresses2022, and #ISTELive. On the heels of such an intense burst of reacclimating, travel, and community engagement, we asked our resident industry experts across the scholarly, education, journals, and books publishing sectors to share: what was it like to be back out in the world and what are some of your impressions of the publishing industry in 2022?

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Publishing and the Climate Emergency: the Monumental Challenge Ahead

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Publishing and the Climate Emergency: the Monumental Challenge Ahead

The global publishing industry has always had a conflicted relationship with the environment. On the one hand, no single industry has done more to educate and inform the general public about environmental issues. Whether through peer reviewed research and journals, consumer magazines, news reporting, books sold in shops or loaned through libraries, pretty much everything we know about the climate crisis is down to publishing, in some shape or form.

Yet, on the flip side, the industry cannot shy away from its own impact on climate change. Hundreds of years of deforestation to serve the print publishing industry are taking its toll. In the US alone, it is estimated that 32m trees are felled every year in order to make books—25 per cent of which are sent back to publishers unsold. Throw in reliance on fossil fuels, water usage, the use of chemical dyes and solvents, and the toll of shipping and flying physical products around the world, and you’ve got yet another manufacturing industry with a resource-heavy supply chain.

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Knowledge Sharing: KGL’s Sonny Regelman Discusses Educational Content Development

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Knowledge Sharing: KGL’s Sonny Regelman Discusses Educational Content Development

KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. has long provided product development services to the preK-12 and higher Education markets, working with many of the big players in addition to smaller and niche education publishers. For the last several years, one of the key leaders of KGL’s Learning Solutions group has been Executive Director, Sonny Regelman, who has experienced working in this field both on the content provider side as well as the vendor side.

Recently, I interviewed Sonny on the ins and outs of educational content development, where publishers experience pain points that partners can solve, the digital transformation of the market accelerated by the pandemic, and what new initiatives are on the horizon for the industry.

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Teaching English as a Second Language: Challenges and Opportunities

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Teaching English as a Second Language: Challenges and Opportunities

KGL is introducing an occasional series of explorations into the current issues in K-12 and higher education, where we will spotlight the varying perspectives of teachers, students, education publishers, and other stakeholders in the learning life cycle. We begin with a conversation with an elementary school teacher of English as a Second Language (ESL), in order to gain more insight into the struggles of students, gaps in ESL and ELT resources, and opportunities for content providers.

Over the last two years, teachers have borne the brunt of the pandemic. Teachers who work in specialized areas of learning where students need additional resources are feeling that to an even greater extent. We sat down with an ESL teacher, Ms. T in a school in the Bronx, New York to better understand the current teaching environment.

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The Rise of OER: A Look at Equity and Quality

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The Rise of OER: A Look at Equity and Quality

The spring semester has started and students are back to the classroom. And with this return to the classroom comes some of the debate over the physical and the virtual that has been brewing recently: in-person versus remote classes, print books versus ebooks, and the effectiveness of using Open Educational Resources (OER).

Over the last several years, higher education has witnessed a rise in the use of OER, though adoption plateaued slightly in the 2019-2020 school year as faculty focused more on pivoting their lessons plans to remote learning. As noted in our recent publishing predictions, we expect to see more adoption and creation of OER materials because of the proven value of OER in making higher learning more equitable. Yet while access to materials might become more equitable, adapting to digital instruction can still create a learning divide.

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Publishing Predictions for 2022

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Publishing Predictions for 2022

Global Accessibility, Advanced Analytics, New Content Types, and More

In what has become an annual tradition here at KGL, we take stock at the start of the year, consult our publishing experts, and go out on a limb to try and foretell what the future holds for our industry. After two years of uncertainty in life as we know it, here are nevertheless some of the top predictions for ongoing and emerging trends that we think publishers should bear in mind as we all make our way carefully into 2022.

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Developing a Culture of Accessibility

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Developing a Culture of Accessibility

Accessibility has been the buzzword in publishing over the last several years as the industry embraces the need to make its content available to all readers. We at KGL have previously highlighted innovations in accessibility in K-12 learning and also potential hazards of not making scholarly content accessible.

As we look to the future, most specifically 2025 when the requirements of the European Accessibility Act will be enforced, we want to focus on the important steps and perhaps changes in corporate culture publishers need to take in order to make their content available for all readers.

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Accessibility Continues to Evolve in Education Publishing

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Accessibility Continues to Evolve in Education Publishing

In an article we published on this blog back in 2017, we highlighted some of the challenges, complexities and benefits associated with making digital educational content (K-12 and Higher Ed) more accessible for visually and cognitively impaired readers.

Fast forward several years and the sector’s commitment to digital equality has really been put to the test. As millions of students all over the world switched to remote learning, educational publishers and learning providers had to act quickly to ensure that all the right resources and content were available digitally in order to support students’ rapidly evolving needs.

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Spotlight on Our India Teams

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Spotlight on Our India Teams

The worldwide publishing industry today would not function without the experience, support and technical skills of vast content services operations in India. Publishers, in the Global North especially, rely on the production and technology expertise of an entire support industry in one of the world’s largest emerging markets.

While initiatives to promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) among staff, authors, reviewers and other stakeholders have (rightfully) taken center stage in recent years at scholarly, education, and trade publishing houses in North America and Europe, they have largely focused on issues of race and gender. Not nearly as much recognition is paid to geographical inclusion or to our industry colleagues in the Global South who ensure the ultimate delivery of a large quantity of the world’s books, journals and other publications.

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The Meteoric Rise of Video Content

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The Meteoric Rise of Video Content

Consumer behavior is constantly evolving. Some consumer trends are temporary and relate to the circumstances and conditions du jour, while others take on greater cultural significance, establishing a permanent foothold on society, our habits and customs, and the way we go about our everyday lives.

Our relationship with video content is perhaps one of the most underestimated cultural phenomena of recent years. And global consumption of video as a medium has certainly accelerated since the start of last year. A recent study by video marketing firm Wyzowl revealed that 68 percent of consumers felt the pandemic had impacted the amount of video content they watched online, with 96 percent saying this had increased.

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Reimagining Virtual School: Better Learning Strategies for a Digital Future

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Reimagining Virtual School: Better Learning Strategies for a Digital Future

Perhaps the most fundamental problem with remote learning is the way that school systems approach the use of technology in the classroom, often simply mirroring in-person activities in a digital environment rather than tailoring or reapproaching lessons using different tools that technology offers. When online learning was just a quick fix until students got back to the classroom, that was fine. But as we look ahead to a future with digital learning likely to continue as part of the curriculum to a certain degree, we want to highlight a few ways that schools and educators can reimagine the virtual experience to be more effective for students and teachers alike.

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Seven Publishing Trends for 2021

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Seven Publishing Trends for 2021

At around the same time last year, publishing industry experts and analysts looked ahead with optimism, hope and excitement as they speculated on what wonders 2020 might bring. As we all know, things didn’t exactly turn out as we expected. But, while many might think that trying to second-guess what the future may hold is a bit like nailing jello to the wall right now, surprisingly there are actually many clear indications of what could be in store for us in 2021. Here are our top seven predictions for what publishers can expect from the year ahead.

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Is XR technology’s “Zoom moment” finally on the horizon?

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Is XR technology’s “Zoom moment” finally on the horizon?

Every year - like clockwork - technology experts and futurists speculate as to whether this will finally be THE YEAR for mass market adoption of VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality) and MR (mixed reality), now commonly referred to under the useful catch-all umbrella term XR (extended reality) technologies.

When the vast majority of the world’s population was plunged into lockdown this year, and whether we liked it or not, staying in became the new going out, these debates around XR adoption logically intensified. This was to be the perfect storm. Suddenly the conditions were ripe for immersive innovations to really come to the fore and show their full potential.

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More than Words: Why Human Translation is Leagues Ahead

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More than Words: Why Human Translation is Leagues Ahead

The American philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky once famously said: “A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.” While these words are revered by many of those who work with languages for a living, decades of attempts to mechanize translation would suggest that the technology industry believes we are not far from finding an automated system which has a deeper understanding of these wider complexities of language.

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The Classroom of the Future: Advances in Remote Learning

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The Classroom of the Future: Advances in Remote Learning

Over the last two decades, technology has gained wider acceptance in the classroom. Since the pandemic, when teachers and students have been abruptly forced apart, tech solutions from video calls to virtual classrooms to online learning platforms have leapt into widespread use and become a lifeline for education this term—a topic we wrote about in a previous blog post.

But as we look toward the next school year and beyond, will these advancements remain a stopgap measure for connecting with students and delivering instruction during unusual circumstances; or has the way children learn been changed forever? The following are some key innovations in digital learning that are likely to be part of K-12 education for a long time.

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