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 Tips from KGL Consulting: Keep Your Authors Happy

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Publishing Tips from KGL Consulting: Keep Your Authors Happy

Greater competition to attract high quality authors and new business models to increase published articles have led to a renewed focus on author satisfaction. What are journals doing to address this? KGL Consulting has identified dozens of ways to help organizations succeed. Here are a few simple ideas to get started.

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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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Knowledge Sharing: KGL's Kelly Lake Offers Learning Insights for Scholarly Publishers

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Knowledge Sharing: KGL's Kelly Lake Offers Learning Insights for Scholarly Publishers

As the research community evolves beyond mere PDFs of journal articles and book chapters, and publishers increasingly use their digital platforms to meet the demand for new, more engaging types of content, one area that shows strong potential is delivery of learning services. Whether it’s professional development courses for practitioners, continuing education credits, or Learning Management System (LMS) integration, publishers can now offer this content in interactive formats to their users. And publishers themselves may want to up their game when it comes to training their own workforce on issues of compliance, technology, and performance. To better help our industry understand the current landscape for eLearning strategy and solutions, I asked the head of KnowledgeWorks Global Learning, Kelly Lake, to explain the methodology, technology applications, and benefits of the L&D solutions her group provides to organizations of all types.

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Lessons Learned and Challenges Ahead for Scholarly Publishers

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Lessons Learned and Challenges Ahead for Scholarly Publishers

Highlights and Reflections from the 2021 KGL PubFactory Virtual Series

Autumn is a busy time for KGL PubFactory. Each year, as industry events start to fill the calendar, our community of customers, partners and staff gather for our user group meeting—held the past two years as the PubFactory Virtual Series. This is a rare and refreshing opportunity to bring together all the inspiring professionals we work with on both sides of the Atlantic, encouraging them to share knowledge, insights and experiences, and to explore how publishers are adopting technology to support their current needs and future goals.

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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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Content Platform Migrations: 5 Important Lessons

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Content Platform Migrations: 5 Important Lessons

The publishing platform business is constantly evolving, with home-grown technologies and commercial solutions continuously developing new capabilities to better serve authors and researchers. As a result, publishers occasionally migrate journals, books and other content from one delivery platform to another, a process considered by many to be something of a perilous minefield.

In March, KGL PubFactory’s very own Tom Beyer took part in a virtual panel discussion at the Electronic Resources and Libraries (ER&L) Annual Conference 2021 entitled “How We Work Together: Improving the Content Platform Migration Process”, alongside some of our friends and colleagues in the NISO Content Platform Migrations Working Group. The session explored the current state of platform migrations from the viewpoint and experiences of a major university press, an academic library and the content platform provider perspective, while showcasing some of the recommendations and deliverables of the NISO Working Group. Here are five key lessons we gleaned from the session.

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Innovations in Content Hosting

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Innovations in Content Hosting

A year of advances for the KGL PubFactory platform and the scholarly community

Since the beginning of a very disruptive 2020, scholarly publishers have had to contend with uncertainty in institutional markets, sudden demands for rapid dissemination of critical research, and an ongoing existential crisis due to Open Access (OA) mandates. Fortunately, industry partners have been there to support content providers of all sizes and types with enhanced workflows, integrated services, and advanced solutions that met the moment.

A review of the last year of exciting developments here at KGL PubFactory demonstrates how publishers of academic books and journals can evolve and even thrive with the right technology support—better serving their authors, users, and society at large even during challenging times.

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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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MUP fields an OA compliance curveball with the support of PubFactory’s SiteGen module

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MUP fields an OA compliance curveball with the support of PubFactory’s SiteGen module

In 2018, we collaborated with Manchester University Press (MUP) on a hosting platform that would bring all of their books and journals online.

Manchester is the largest research university in the UK, and the Press is one of the largest University Presses in the UK, publishing around 200 books and 6 journals a year.

Our emphasis at PubFactory over the last 20 years has been one of combining and hosting different kinds of content on a single web platform. The MUP project was of particular importance to us in 2018 in that it not only dealt with both books and journals, but it also involved hosting both subscription and Open Access (OA) content.

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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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Designing Your User Experience Strategy, Part 3 (The Creative Process)

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Designing Your User Experience Strategy, Part 3 (The Creative Process)

When designing your publishing platform, there are many factors to consider to deliver an optimal user experience. It’s critical to establish a user-first driven process.

As discussed in parts 1 and 2, it is imperative that your web publishing platform be designed with accessibility, responsiveness, and consistency for all users and devices. Publisher websites are often built using templates and components to help present content in a familiar pattern that users recognize and can easily access. But when designing the “skin” for these experiences, maintain your stylistic uniqueness to strengthen your brand presence. Your brand’s attributes and voice must be visually communicated.

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Designing Your User Experience Strategy, Part 2 (Accessibility Improves Experience)

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Designing Your User Experience Strategy, Part 2 (Accessibility Improves Experience)

Website accessibility is not a new topic. In fact, it’s been a factor since 2010 when the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) published standards that digital technology and information must be accessible to all people. At that point, most companies did not think that responsibility for website accessibility applied to them, or that they were required to address it unless they were receiving federal funds/grants. Additionally, the general perception was that creating accessible websites was more costly and entailed a lengthier process to implement. Not surprisingly, the ROI to include accessibility as part of the web design process was not considered valuable enough to be a default priority.

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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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Teaching with Tech: Five Tips for Navigating K–12 Distance Instruction

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Teaching with Tech: Five Tips for Navigating K–12 Distance Instruction

It would be an understatement to say that these are challenging times for teachers. Plunged into lockdown with no time to prepare for it, educators are quickly adapting to the new realities of distance instruction while getting up to speed with technology platforms, unfamiliar teaching techniques, and changing district and institutional guidelines. Throw in pressures to ensure students don’t fall behind juxtaposed with advice to refrain from overwhelming students and their families, and the situation becomes even more delicate.

Technology has without doubt been the great enabler of education during the COVID-19 crisis.

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Publishing as an Essential Business

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Publishing as an Essential Business

A round-up of how the industry is responding to the COVID-19 pandemic

In these challenging times, there has been much discussion of what qualifies as an “essential business.” There is the debate around which establishments should be allowed to continue physical operations during a social distancing shutdown (are liquor stores, bike shops and video games as essential as grocery stores and the healthcare supply chain?). Some organizational habits like meeting culture, long commutes and digital red tape have already been exposed as decidedly nonessential for a post-crisis world. But while the majority of us adjust to working from home (a luxury obviously not afforded to many frontline professions), the coronavirus pandemic is unfolding as an occasion for the industry to prove its worth.

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Unleashing the Untapped Potential of Digital Learning

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Unleashing the Untapped Potential of Digital Learning

A free report from KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Across most levels of education, students now expect learning experiences to be broadly in-line with their fast moving, digitally native, on-the-go lifestyles. And the pressure to cater to this need and deliver learning in a dynamic way is something which educational institutions feel on a daily basis. Innovation in this area has unfortunately not always evolved quickly enough to match the expectations of this new generation of learners, who now require digital curriculums which embrace quick and easy access, cross device capabilities and multimedia elements.

Our recently published report Six Approaches to Effective Digital Learning highlights some of the most exciting trends, transformations and technological developments in this booming sector, and in this post we explore just a few of the report’s findings.

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AI 2.0: Machine-Generated Content, Intelligent Automation, and the Future of Academic Publishing

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AI 2.0: Machine-Generated Content, Intelligent Automation, and the Future of Academic Publishing

Every year at the Frankfurt Book Fair, there is a buzzword or phrase that continues to pop up on panels, in articles, and in conversations and meetings. In the past, we have seen ‘big data’ and ‘blockchain’ dominate the headlines, but this year’s buzz word (or acronym) was ‘AI,’ as publishers, information professionals, service providers, and the media debated how this technology can be used in the industry.

Because machine learning and artificial intelligence are integral to KGL’s work helping to alleviate pain points for publishers, we partnered with Springer Nature to host a panel entitled “AI 2.0: Machine-Generated Content, Intelligent Automation, and the Future of Academic Publishing.” On the panel, speakers from KGL (Cenveo at the time), HighWire, and Springer Nature talked about everything from workflow automation and high-speed publishing, to companies that use machine learning and AI for discovery, peer review, and even highlighted emerging technologies which allow publishers to offer a broader range of tools and services to serve researchers and authors.

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