The Story So Far – PublishOne In Education

PublishOne has always been strong in the legal and regulatory market, working closely with professional information providers such as Wolters Kluwer. Over the years, our platform has evolved with the needs of our publishers and their customers.

There’s a strong overlap between professional information and the training and education market. In recent times, many traditional publishing houses have moved into the training and education space. Berghauser Pont is a great example. Their portals, training, and events enable public sector professionals to share knowledge and develop skills, collaboratively. 

Today, PublishOne enhances publishing workflows in a broad range of markets, including training and education. Here’s the story of PublishOne’s journey so far, and where we’re heading next on our journey into the education sector.

 

Multichannel publishing for training and education

PublishOne has actually served the education market for the past decade or so. It began in 2015 with VAPRO who needed a multichannel solution for delivering workplace training courses and exams. 

Historically, education is a sector that’s heavily print-based. Not only did VAPRO deploy the PublishOne platform to smooth the transition from paper to digital, they also used it to innovate multichannel workflows for repurposing standardized content. Today, PublishOne enables VAPRO to easily adapt and customize standard training materials for different customers’ needs. 

In an age of multichannel educational products – from portals to e-learning modules – this is one reason why the training and education market is such a great fit for our platform.

 

An easier way to handle educational content

Training and education products typically contain specialist material that’s highly structured. Often, learning content need updating in response to regulatory or technological changes – not unlike the content produced by legal publishers. 

At the same time, trainers and educators need reusability, adapting content for use in different learning contexts and formats – from printed text books and PDFs to interactive e-learning platforms. Publishers serving the corporate market with in-house training also have a need to repackage and rebrand various components of course content to create bespoke materials for various clients. 

PublishOne’s user-friendly system for handling publishing workflows enables you to convert documents to XML and other formats in just a couple of clicks. That means the same content can be updated and repurposed in minutes, as opposed to making painstaking and time-consuming manual edits to the same content across different educational resources. 

Making learning content engaging and interactive can be a significant drain on educators’ time and resources. Adding interactivity to teaching materials requires an additional layer of technical know-how, and it takes time. With PublishOne and an integration like Learnosity  you can easily create interactive e-learning modules from inside PublishOne with no need for external tools. 

Producing large technical manuals and textbooks for vocational and technical fields can be a struggle when content is stored in a single file using a word processor. Ideally, it needs to be broken down into manageable chunks for editing, and publishing across different channels at the same time. That’s the other great thing about PublishOne. Updates and edits only need to be made once, and the changes can be published everywhere.

 

Opportunities to add value to learning content

VAPRO helped us understand the true value of PublishOne to the training and education market. At its core, the platform makes it much easier for publishers, editors, and authors to work with highly technical content. In the education sector, content is often siloed within a specific Learning Management System (LMS) or created in external e-learning tools that can be plugged into an LMS. This restricts your ability to reuse it and maximize its value. 

Inside PublishOne content is seamlessly converted and published to multiple formats with almost no effort at all. For example, you can turn the chapter of a textbook into an interactive e-learning module, a printable PDF, or course content on an LMS. Say the content in that chapter needs an update. You simply update the original content, then click to publish the changes across multiple locations. Simple.

 

Total control over documents, authors, and status

Like the legal profession, educational content is often produced by a professional who is not by definition an ‘author’. For example, Uitgeversgroep’s educational products are created by practicing teachers in their spare time. For that reason, their ‘authors’ need publishing technology that’s easy to pick up and use without extensive training. The fact that teachers can use familiar tools like Microsoft Word within the PublishOne environment (or from the Word app itself) is hugely appealing.  

At the same time, educators create a lot of content, often editing the same thing multiple times for different purposes. Without clear oversight and control, this can lead to issues with versioning. Collaborators can struggle to identify the correct version of a document and can end up editing the wrong one. The same goes for assets in general. Without clear oversight over documents and data, education companies can lose visibility over the assets they already have, and therefore miss opportunities to repurpose them, and optimize their value.

 

A secure yet easy-to-integrate content repository

For most organizations today, when it comes to technology, it’s important to have flexibility. Software and systems evolve so rapidly, it can be costly and time-consuming to leave one provider and move to another. 

In education, a good example is a Learning Management System (LMS). Should an educational institution decide to switch, migration can be slow and complicated, especially when content is held in different locations or multiple systems. It can also take a lot of time for teachers to adapt to a new LMS; changing systems of any kind can result in resistance from some educators who are used to doing things a certain way.

PublishOne is a central and secure cloud-based repository built on the Microsoft Azure platform. It’s designed to keep documents and data safe, yet enable you to connect content to multiple output sources. With everything in one, easy-to-integrate environment, it’s simple to connect your content to a new LMS should you decide to switch. 

 

Moving between professional information and education

From our journey so far, it’s clear that the PublishOne platform can create real value for organizations that want to either improve their existing educational workflows or move products into the education market. It facilitates versatility and reusability of content without the need for content creators to give-up their favorite apps – like Microsoft Word. 

Of course, this is all part of a much bigger transition from books on a shelf to digital educational tools on the Internet. No matter where your educational content is delivered, PublishOne supports a full range of print and digital outputs.

To learn more about our innovative solutions for creating, managing, and publishing education and training content, catch one of our friendly team at the following events:

 

• Frankfurter Buchmesse 2024 – Stand 4.0 G80 

• BETT UK 2025, London – Stand TBC

To book an appointment or a free demo today, contact us