CAPDM and Courseworker do to domains of course materials what architects and steel frameworks do to buildings.

Why do organisations invest in new buildings? So they can improve the efficiency of their operations, enter new market places, grow their business, and enhance their balance sheets with long term assets.

Forward thinking education providers invest in a learning architecture and Courseworker for exactly the same reasons. Single source publishing using XML is the most efficient way to produce blended learning materials for programmes. Flexibility in chosen learning designs can still be accommodated, but the manufacturing efficiencies of using batch production tools are outstanding.

Batch typesetting a 700 page academic textbook in a few minutes, particularly one that is stuffed with equations and tables, is frankly amazing. Extending that to form an interactive online PDF eBook becomes highly convenient.

Using the same course master to then generate thousands of accessible web pages in seconds, for loading into your online learning environment, becomes strategic, because you can now output your materials to all media and any open delivery system.

Following this with batch generated re-brands and updates to the materials over the subsequent years of usage is highly cost effective, saving up to 60% of the total production cost over the lifetime of each course module.

Good semantic foundations for your course materials, produced within a Courseworker single sourcing support framework, will equip your production teams to construct and maintain better quality programmes, and your very own strategic domain of course content.

The UK’s Open University have been doing it for years. Now you can with CAPDM and Courseworker.

Continuous materials management is an ongoing commitment, requiring ongoing resourcing and financial support. Why bother?

Many academic publishers treat learning materials as lumps of static knowledge, produced in publications once for profit and then ignored, perhaps painfully exhumed at a later date when the potential value of their reuse is re-established.

Such publishers leave their materials to fall fallow between releases, occasionally releasing update or correction sheets to maintain reasonable currency and fitness for purpose.

We believe learning materials are live sources of explicit knowledge, requiring vendor independent formatting, regular and immediate maintenance and re-distribution, and long term management for posterity.

If students are being mislead by an inappropriate explanation in a workbook or module text, quality management dictates that corrections should be applied immediately and visibly across all forms of the course materials, all language versions, and in all delivery systems.

If authors are no longer present or unable to maintain their materials, the materials and the programmes based on them, must be secure for the departments, tutors and students dependent on them.

Significant amounts of time and effort go into creating quality learning materials. Today’s quality management and long term cost considerations require education providers to stop treating them like disposable commodities, and start cherishing them as explicit components of managed knowledge domains.

Courseworker has been designed to help achieve this goal. Single source masters help in XML; formal revision and release control; rapid re-generation of new versions in all language forms; support for global digital distribution and uploading to your VLE; and monthly, volume based license and service fees, are all product features that implement the continuous updating goal.

"I say Module you say Course. I say Topic, you say Unit." Quite quickly these kind of inconsistencies in terminology can lead to significant mis-understandings in course design, production and use.

Courseworker helps to remove these variations by helping you to applying the use of key terms such as: programme, course, module, subject, unit, section, topic, examination, test, outcome, objective and case, consistently across the entire domain of learning materials being produced.

Courseworker itself can also be setup to use the terms and structure of your programme and its course components.

• Fast batch typesetting and page layout of large academic publications with fine control using processing instruction overrides.
• Separate graphics file inclusion and reuse.
• Automatic page numbering and re-numbering.
• Automatic section, figure, table, diagram, question and answer numbering and linking.
• Automatic table of content generation and insertion.
• Automatic reference, glossary and index term and link management.
• Generation of unique identifiers and link management.
• Use of style definitions held external to the XML content.
  

Yes, but that’s not so hard. In our experience most course developers who are comfortable using MS Word or other word processors can become capable XML developers in a day or two. Have a look around at the XML Editors available (see below) and you should find one that will get you started, usually with a free-trial period.

We currently use Oxygen and XMetal ourselves for development, and have also used Arbortext, XMLBlueprint, XMLSpy and Emacs with XML extensions at some point. We do not recommend any specific XML editor so choose one you like and let us know if we can help to support it better. Try Oxygen  first if you are unsure.

You do. We make no claims over anything you develop with Courseworker. Everything Courseworker generates from your sources is yours too.

Only by its excellent value and service we believe :-) You can walk away at any time and take all you master sources and output files with you. That means files in XML, PDF, HTML and ePUB formats, which you can re-use with other XML publishing tools, services or vendors.

This is a small question with a big answer that has been discussed for a decade now at least. Just Google “Why invest in XML” and see what you get. CAPDM (the company behind Courseworker) built the World’s largest non-tutored online MBA programme with it, helping Edinburgh Business School to gain more than one hundred million GBP in the last 20 years. Ask the UK Open University or ConneXions why they invested in XML. In short, it’s an investment in open standards for content, production efficiency, future-proofing and strategic business flexibility, but only if it’s done properly and for good reason. If you are still in doubt whether it’s for you, please do get in touch with CAPDM Ltd. at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

We appreciate the value of supporting both of these packaging standards even though many of our existing customers have not asked for them. We plan to provide SCORM support in Courseworker later in 2012.

Courseworker is built on top of the Amazon EC2 cloud service. All your source materials uploaded are stored in the Amazon cloud. Whilst this is a very reliable service, we strongly recommend that you keep your source materials locally and secure them yourselves. We accept no responsibility for any data loss associated with a failure of service either by the underlying Amazon infrastructure, or Courseworker.

Yes, as detailed in our Standard Terms and Conditions of use, which you are required to agree to when you register to use the service. You are responsible for legal use of copyrighted materials. We reserve the right to suspend or delete accounts found to be being used for illegal purposes, and to inform the relevant authorities.

Courseworker is an independent, standards-based production environment for teams of XML content developers producing courses in a shared content domain, that must be delivered online in multiple virtual learning environments including Blackboard, Moodle and other open learning delivery systems. It includes a powerful TeX based XML typesetting engine for producing Publisher-quality textbooks for print and eBooks for online Readers and Tablets.

Courseworker for Moodle is an entry-level XML publishing environment for Moodle only. It makes single-source publishing with XML affordable and much simpler to do and is a great place to start to learn how to work with XML for producing content rich, highly interactive online e-learning courses. It is for individual developers only, and provides a specific subset of Courseworker’s production templates and tools which it optimises for producing Moodle 2.2+ courses.

Both environments use similar XML single source masters, web production tools and schemas. Upgrading to an enterprise level Courseworker team environment from Courseworker for Moodle is usually straightforward. Doing so validates your initial investment in working with XML open standards, and provides a forward migration path into full-blown single source publishing across your whole enterprise and future learning delivery media.