Higher-Ed ePublishing Solutions, EPUB for Education, Higher Education Solutions

ePublishing Solutions for Higher-Education

SunTec Digital holds the experience of working with some of the world’s biggest names in higher-ed publishing and media, including Encyclopedia Britannica, University of Virginia Press, UPNE, Trident Media Group, USA, Volante, Sweden, Peter Fraser & Dunlop Agency, UK, WHO, Italy, Schattauer, Germany, Pagepress, Italy, International Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (IFCC), Hungary to name a few.

From information compiling and structuring to typesetting, together with multi-format, multi-channel publishing and distribution, SunTec Digital is involved in the entire life-cycle of the publications. Our dedicated teams of content developers, instructional designers, programmers, and subject matter experts, headed by a Project Manager devise efficient strategies and workflows that ease the trouble of making the transition from print to digital to mobile.

Semantically-Enhanced Interactive eTextbooks

Leveraging existing open standards, including HTML5, CSS3, EPUB3, and EPUB for education, metadata, and structural standards – SunTec Digital employs best practices of digital publishing to create content that is semantically structured, highly accessible, and relevant for higher education.

We create interactive, rich-layout publications in EPUB3 with HTML5 and CSS3, ensuring accessibility across devices, browsers, and operating systems. We embed multimedia content like sound effects, voice-overs, audio, video, 2D and 3D animations, educational puzzles, games & quizzes, assessments, simulations, and intervention products, etc., to provide students with an engaging digital learning experience.

Higher-Ed ePublishing Solutions Workflow: Case in Point

Client

One of the most prominent learning science companies, offering a wide spectrum of customized educational content, software, and services for pre-K through postgraduate education.

Project Details

The client wanted to optimize the content value chain for 500+ titles comprising journals, research papers, and postgraduate reference books for improved accessibility, learning management, and assessment, together with easy distribution and LMS integration.

Solutions Offered

We leveraged the advanced features and functions of EPUB for education in combination with HTML5 and CSS3 for developing & converting learning content in tune with the client’s requirements.

Content Model: We first devised a content model to describe a book’s structure: hierarchy-linked TOC, H1-H6 Headings, nested sections, page-list navigation, etc.
Metadata: We applied educational metadata properties, such as type of audience, type of learning resource, edition, age range, and accessibility metadata, such as alternative text to explain images, illustrations, graphs and diagrams, page numbers, accessibility control features, like full keyboard control, full voice control, etc.
Structure and Navigation: We incorporated a complete structural hierarchy of the publication, together with a shortened version of the hierarchy at the beginnings of certain sections to serve as a chapter TOC.
Structural Semantics: Implemented well-structured semantics such as a footnote, assessment, etc., for predictability and remixability.
Images: We used the sRGB color space for digital media; PNG/SVG formats for vector images (line art, image fallbacks of equations, bitmap images that include text, etc.); and JPEG for photographs and other bitmap images.

Distributable Objects: We defined distributable objects (e.g., a chapter, a section, an exercise or a promotional excerpt, a video or interactive feature,) so that they can be integrated separately into an LMS.
Scriptable Components: We created interactive “widgets” that could be incorporated into the publications and exchanged as Distributable Objects.
Annotations: We incorporated standard ways to exchange annotations, and provided various levels of access for annotations (personal, student ↔ student, student ↔ teacher, parent ↔ teacher).
Multiple Renditions: We bundled multiple versions of the content, e.g. reflowable/fixed, multiple languages, etc., for multi-channel publishing.
LMS integration: We ensured that the output files could be easily integrated with the client’s LMS for assessments, and tracking outcomes.