CourseworkerXML

CAPDM and CourseworkerXML do to domains of course materials what architects and steel frameworks do to buildings.

Why do organisations invest in new buildings?  So they can improve the efficiency of their operations, enter new market places, grow their business, and enhance their balance sheets with long term assets.

Forward thinking education providers invest in a learning architecture and CourseworkerXML for exactly the same reasons. Single source publishing using XML is the most efficient way to produce blended learning materials for programmes. Flexibility in chosen learning designs can still be accommodated, but the manufacturing efficiencies of using batch production tools are outstanding.

Batch typesetting a 700 page academic textbook in a few minutes, particularly one that is stuffed with equations and tables, is frankly amazing. Extending that to form an interactive online PDF eBook becomes highly convenient.

Using the same course master to then generate thousands of accessible web pages in seconds, for loading into your online learning environment, becomes strategic, because you can now output your materials to all media and any open delivery system.

Following this with batch generated re-brands and updates to the materials over the subsequent years of usage is highly cost effective, saving up to 60% of the total production cost over the lifetime of each course module.

Good semantic foundations for your course materials, produced within a CourseworkerXML single sourcing support framework, will equip your production teams to construct and maintain better quality programmes, and your very own strategic domain of course content.

The UK’s Open University have been doing it for years. Now you can with CAPDM and CourseworkerXML.

Continuous materials management is an ongoing commitment, requiring ongoing resourcing and financial support. Why bother?

Many academic publishers treat learning materials as lumps of static knowledge, produced in publications once for profit and then ignored, perhaps painfully exhumed at a later date when the potential value of their reuse is re-established.

Such publishers leave their materials to fall fallow between releases, occasionally releasing update or correction sheets to maintain reasonable currency and fitness for purpose.

We believe learning materials are live sources of explicit knowledge, requiring vendor independent formatting, regular and immediate maintenance and re-distribution, and long term management for posterity.

If students are being mislead by an inappropriate explanation in a workbook or module text, quality management dictates that corrections should be applied immediately and visibly across all forms of the course materials, all language versions, and in all delivery systems.

If authors are no longer present or unable to maintain their materials, the materials and the programmes based on them, must be secure for the departments, tutors and students dependent on them.

Significant amounts of time and effort go into creating quality learning materials. Today’s quality management and long term cost considerations  require education providers to stop treating them like disposable commodities, and start cherishing them as explicit components of managed knowledge domains.

CourseworkerXML has been designed to help achieve this goal. Single source masters help in XML; formal revision and release control; rapid re-generation of new versions in all language forms; support for global digital distribution and uploading to your VLE; and monthly, volume based license and service fees, are all product features that implement the continuous updating goal.

"I say Module you say Course. I say Topic, you say Unit." Quite quickly these kind of inconsistencies in terminology can lead to significant mis-understandings in course design, production and use.

CourseworkerXML helps to remove these variations by helping you to applying the use of key terms such as: programme, course, module, subject, unit, section, topic, examination, test, outcome, objective and case, consistently across the entire domain of learning materials being produced.

CourseworkerXML itself can also be setup to use the terms and structure of your programme and its course components.

• Fast batch typesetting and page layout of large academic publications with fine control using processing instruction overrides.
• Separate graphics file inclusion and reuse.
• Automatic page numbering and re-numbering.
• Automatic section, figure, table, diagram, question and answer numbering and linking.
• Automatic table of content generation and insertion.
• Automatic reference, glossary and index term and link management.
• Generation of unique identifiers and link management.
• Use of style definitions held external to the XML content.