AZARDI, Education and People

Earlier this week I read an interesting article about tablets in the classroom in the latest Digital Book World newsletter. It referred to this upbeat article with more than a little spin in the Buffalo News.

However this article highlights just some of the problems with current reading systems and business strategies that are faced in developing markets, and how AZARDI:Content Fulfilment system directly addresses this problem area.

The Buffalo News article is about the problems of people with "too much". But kids are kids, and in this post I try to highlight just a few of the issues we have faced addressing the problems of controlled content delivery to hundreds of thousands (and soon millions) of young students in dozens of institutions around the developing world; some who have too much; many who just hope for a meal every day (and an education to change that fact).

Worldwide Education

The problem with talking about digital content education for the developing world is...

• it's like malaria, sad but what can I do...
• there are children in developing countries with the same benefits and privileges as developed country which obfuscates the real problems...
• there are those with exactly nothing for whom the solutions must be created, relevant and delivered.
• How do we make money?

We are working at addressing these rather emotional problems with cold-blooded technology solutions.

Up until recently our solutions have been addressing the "fat cats" (Yes, I am a child of the 60s). 2013 appears to be the year that moves for the "have-nots" becomes real, probably not because anyone cares but because business men see money, politicians see votes and want to look like visionaries, or something. What we want to ensure is that no matter how much greed, corruption and dilution there is of the business context, the victims students get the value of great digital content right in their device.

Print vs. Digital

While the purchase of textbooks may be workable on a book-by-book basis for tertiary education, it falls flat with K-12 education and enhanced trade and personal learning course material.

Selling individual digital books falls very flat when an education system's content is delivered in English but must include Marathi, or is delivered in Marathi and must include Hindi and English, or any one of the other dozens of languages spoken in India, or for that matter many countries around the world.

Selling individual digital books falls amazingly flat when the price of a print book is Rs 25 (USD 0.50) and there are 40 million print copies of each book distributed ever year (just Maharashtra). How does the digital content machine match that? Digital distribution is multiples of that cost.

The cost of print vs. the cost of digital arguments bandied about fly out the window when the machine is already built to deliver print content in massive volume at the lowest possible costs. The paper may be newsprint quality, but the content is excellent. There has to be significant rethinking of the value of digital content by creating exceptional learning experiences.

K is for Kids

K-12 is about education for all. Tertiary is about personal choice and development if you have the financial resources.

The strong dialog on the digital textbook Internet is of course the U.S. talking about the U.S. which is lovely in a goldfish bowl kind-of-way.  The voracious corporations see education as a very large and lucrative market both for the sale of devices and content. All the major e-retailer operations are trying to corner the perceived education market $$$ to sell tablets and control the content; while the commentators are revving this engine and treating it as a significant bout... "In the left corner weighing 100 Billion dollars...." etc.. It's mostly irrelevant noise in the ROW (Rest Of World).

Delivering education content to "the masses" in developing countries is harder than you think.  The equation is:

Device  + delivery  + content  =  achieved.

In this context the real problem is delivery of content which means storage, transfer and reading systems.

Publishers are generally protective of their content. They want it used, not misused.

Optimally all content is Internet or WiFi downloaded from a standard location by all students and teachers. Unfortunately that is unlikely to be practical even in relatively well funded schools in developing countries.

There has to be an option to securely side-load content into reading systems where network resources are unavailable or too limited.

This highlights the limitations of the personal nature and closed channel of systems like iTunes. It has to be possible to mass distribute content without network or the Internet.

Delivering Education Content to the World

There are a number of major considerations for a publisher (and by publisher we mean anyone delivering content to education consumers).

For the student/learner/consumer...

• Timely deliver of content (term/semesters don't wait)
• Easy access to the content by students (or as easy as possible)
• Cost of content to the end user
• Cost of content delivery to the end user
• Relevance of content for the learning profile

For the publisher...

• Publisher return on investment
• Security of content
• Appropriate expiry of content at the end of term or exams
• Market differentiation
• Mixed publisher content to the same students

With our experience in developing countries there are a few additional considerations concerning the total cost of content fulfilment operations. This includes:

• Bandwidth transfer costs to millions of students
• Is there even a network delivery option?
• WiFi network performance if it does exist
• The existence of supporting computers or networks at all for the transfer of data
• No tablets, just some workstations

Essentially the budgets and resources are not available to have network resources to match the use of tablets even in well funded schools.

The delivery system has to be able to allow the secure handling of content with the following delivery methods:

• Internet, network/WiFi delivery
• CD-ROM/DVD delivery
• Sideload readers and contents from workstations or even USB sticks.

And never discount the required jump forward. In education and training everyone needs the certificate. So at the same time expectations are very high with what a learning content delivery system will in fact do. It has to be more than just passive content.

We have been told the AZARDI reading systems also need to have LMS (Learning Management System) like features oriented to a course/class social grouping model with teacher in control. So we are working on that. We call it LMS Lite at present and will probably integrate WebRTC as well, just because we can. Whether learning institutions can use it is another issue, but if it is all built on accessible open source technology they will be able to use as infrastructure develops.

Obviously this is only going to happen where the network or internet connections exist, but penetration of tablets is definitely the egg. It needs to be ready.

User Management Systems

Content fulfilment systems are about connecting the right users with the right content on time. It is specifically about delivering this content to that exact student.

AZARDI:Content Fulfilment in Courseware delivery mode has a number of ways to control the delivery of content to students in an institution. One of the most difficult issues is how to register students so content can be delivered to them. We have to address the fact that students change standards/grades every year. It is a moving target.

Mob Login. In this model it is the institutions source URL that is authorized. The student can access their course content directly and independently. That needs a lot of bandwidth to be available and makes it hard to segregate content by course.

API Protocol registration. Integration of the content fulfilment system to institution admin systems is probably too expensive and probably doesn't even exist in this market context. We have the features but doubt they will be used in the near future.

Individual registration. This is probably the simplest and most effective way and can be conducted as a start of term/semester introduction activity. It implies some level of wireless or broadband connectivity is available.

Bulk-user registration. Users can be multiple registered by uploading a spreadsheet (CSV) file. Quite practical up to a few hundred students and the onus of getting it all right goes onto one administrator who has to have the resources to create a spreadsheet.

Reading System Updates

The AZARDI reading systems address more interactive, presentation and content formatting issues than any other reading systems available and probably always will. Our innovative interpretation of fixed layout beyond the paper book can be seen in our demonstration book Fixed Layout Grows Up available from the AZARDI Resources page.

However as brilliant as a reading system may be, in the environments discussed above, upgrades have to be syncronized with terms/semesters. The more interactive and groovy content is the more it has to be tested when delivered to millions on disparate systems.

That is why we developed the AZARDI Interactive Engine. It allows intensive interactive experiences with a focus on interactive Questions and Answers. Self paced learning using objective Q&A is the exact opposite to the Socratic method, but in 2013 the tablet is going to be the Socrates for each individual.

While Android 4 does at last seem to have settled down and at last delivers a reasonable browser with SVG (at last), the emergence of tablets such as the Ubuntu range opens new opportunities to deliver stable, less market driven tablets of with performance at less cost. It probably neatly side-steps the silly tablet IP wars going on as well. That is freakishly cool.

While there may be some pushback in developed countries the Ubuntu tablet initiative is at least incredibly interesting and potentially game changing out here in the boondocks. We will be loading it into a device as soon as possible.

Summary

This has been a post on a subject that is probably of little interest to most and written with too much detail. I concede there is a prosolytizing aspect to this post. But it is also an interesting problem with an unmatched scale and complexity in the digital content world. Even if you are not directly a part of it, it is good to know these wheels are turning. It is fun and frustrating being a small part of it.

After all of this we are hoping the quality of the content that publishers are going to deliver matches the efforts and costs of developing digital content fulfilment in developing country environments. We have a few lectures on that one as well!

AZARDI:Content Fulfilment has grown out of a project with OUP delivering interactive and rich media English Language Teaching content to 30K+ (rich) Brazilian children for the past two years. Long before ePub3 was "invented". It was upgraded to ePub3 when the fixed layout specification was released. The content is now going to many other countries as well.

Infogrid Pacific is an ardent supporter of standards. AZARDI was the first reading system to support ePub3. IGP:Digital Publisher was ready with ePub3 format generation options in October 2011. I have pretty much made the decision that the developing world content we produce for projects in hand will be epub zero with power support for HTML5. This is so content is seamlessly available for Internet delivery and compliant reading system delivery and new production and delivery tools can move forward without being constrained by un-necessary packaging rules. With e0 packaging is radically simplified and more content will be produced faster and to a higher standard. Of course AZARDI:Content Fulfilment and AZARDI reading systems will continue its faultless support of ePub3 major features for those countries that need backward compatability.

In the developing world digital content market it is clear there are two distinct and very different set of digital content requirements. Those who need it to profit... . Those who need it to live.

AZARDI:Content Fulfilment is the cold blooded neutral and affordable working technology that changes that dicotomy into a fusion.