ThiemeMeulenhoff
Renewal of education through offering effective learning solutions
Context
Educational content creation
ThiemeMeulenhoff, part of Klett Group, is a Dutch education media specialist and provides educational solutions for primary, secondary, vocational and higher education. These solutions have been developed in close cooperation with the educational market and they contribute to improved learning results as well as individual talent development.
Challenge
Transformation to a learning design company
ThiemeMeulenhoff is transforming from a book publisher to a learning design company. ThiemeMeulenhoff supports schools through the renewal of education by offering effective learning solutions. These learning solutions include a smart combination of learning design, content & technology and knowledge about the learning and working process, customized to the needs of each particular school.
This means that not only has ThiemeMeulenhoff’s content changed, but also their work processes and their vision of content development. ThiemeMeulenhoff develops flexible modular content that is tailored to fit the situation of each individual school (infrastructure, educational vision, etc.).
Solution
XML-first creation process
Flexible and reusable content plays an important role in the learning solutions that ThiemeMeulenhoff develops. To facilitate 21st century, personalized learning, ThiemeMeulenhoff is changing its content creation process from product-driven to topic-based writing. The educational content that typically consists of theory and inter-related interactive questions is highly modular and uses extensive metadata. Also, all content is (to be) related to learning objectives. All these aspects are important for multi-channel, multi-use publication and to support adaptive, personalized learning.
To meet all these requirements, ThiemeMeulenhoff and partners Crius, Fonto, and XStructuring, started updating ThiemeMeulenhoff’s content creation and management tools in 2013. The goal was to develop a single system for all content types and an XML-first creation process. Therefore, one single schema set and toolset for both theory and question content was developed for a new content creation and management system.
DITA for theory and questions/assessments
For theory content, DITA was chosen as the preferred XML-standard. For questions and assessments, both DITA L&T and IMS QTI were considered. However, these standards proved to be too restrictive. With the expectation that ThiemeMeulenhoff’s needs with respect to question types will become more demanding, it was decided to use the DITA standard because of its specialization architecture.
“Fonto shares our vision of content development while working with open standards. The web-based XML editor is a good combination of content, structure and form.”​
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