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Pearson Lowers Its Costs While Helping Instructors Plan Lessons Faster
Challenge
Step inside classrooms worldwide, and you’re likely to find educational materials from publishers such as Prentice Hall, Addison Wesley, and PowerSchool. You’ll also find instructors bringing these materials to life with multimedia presentations that go beyond the textbooks of yesteryear.
Both these scenarios have Pearson Education in common. The global leader in education publishing, Pearson provides hundreds of thousands of educators with a range of products, including curriculum materials and complementary multimedia assets.
While the depth of information available to instructors who subscribe to Pearson courses is phenomenal, access to that information has been an issue. Without consistent naming conventions, tagging or keyword search, there’s been no easy way for instructors to find the content they want on the available CDs, which can contain thousands of multimedia files. Often, instructors spend hours wading through the discs to prepare courses, resort to the web to search, or simply load the CDs during class and plow through the contents as students wait.
Pearson knew they could do better. They envisioned a way to enable instructors to access all this information online in an easily searchable library with an intuitive interface. Simple in theory, it was a daunting task, even with Pearson’s own skilled teams on the project. So they turned to some trusted partners, including Universal Mind, who had helped them realize eText, Pearson’s next-generation platform for electronic text delivery.
Process
To begin, during Universal Mind’s overarching Discovery phase, which included extensive user research, Pearson and Universal Mind teams focused on creating clear requirements, setting aside for the time being, any Flex development and design comps Pearson had already begun. Then, with Universal Mind facilitating, they prioritized the top features that would go into the first release, which let them start design and development quickly.
Pearson had recently begun exploring the Agile process of development—a methodology Universal Mind teams are well-versed in. Partnering with Universal Mind, they revisited the project through the lens of Agile, which takes a large development project with long-term requirements and breaks it into bite-sized, achievable feature-sets. This requires teams to prioritize a set of features that go in each release, then focus on Discovery, Design and Development cycles for those features, with a nod toward how they’ll ultimately be deployed as part of a greater whole.
Throughout the process, Pearson relied heavily on Universal Mind to coordinate user experience design and implementation, driving wire framing exercises, prototyping for the team producing the interface design, and implementing the interface in the Flex front-end. Throughout, Universal Mind facilitated the Agile process for the entire project team, which included Pearson and other contract resources.
Result
After several short iterative engineering cycles, the team completed the first release of Jazz, an online tool that delivers immediate access to the thousands of instructional resources associated with Pearson’s courses. It enables publishers at Pearson to index any of the company’s course titles and tag the resources associated with them by keyword, topical hierarchy, and content type, such as lesson plans, quizzes or animated examples. In this way, instructors who subscribe to Pearson’s course titles can get vastly easier access to the applicable instructional materials and supplemental content.
Instructors can intelligently navigate to the content that’s relevant to them using Jazz’s simple workflow-driven interface. Once they find the resources they need, they can save them in folders and present them in the classroom with just a few clicks. Instructors can also annotate the resources that they’ve selected and create their own text-based slides. There’s no need to pull assets into presentation software such as Microsoft PowerPoint, but Jazz also allows instructors to download individual resources to use in their own tools and materials, if necessary. In this way, Jazz streamlines the lesson planning process. “It’s like having your own virtual grad student to do the research and asset gathering for you,” said a team member.
What’s more, by moving away from CDs to an online repository and toolset, Pearson reduces the cost of updating and delivering instructional resources while increasing the speed at which they can offer instructors the latest assets.
Jazz’s first release offers resources for four titles across three business units, but the tool is available as a publishing option to any business unit. Plus Pearson executives are encouraging all product teams to use Jazz for instructor resource distribution.
“This is just the beginning,” says Michael Britt, eLearning specialist at Pearson Education. “We’re planning to enable instructors to share multimedia materials in Jazz with students …and to integrate with Pearson’s eText products so that the electronic version of a book and its resources work together seamlessly. With Universal Mind we know we can make it all happen.”
