Pearson, a US-based provider of educational content and services, will co-host a workshop on digital publishing in education, EDUPUB, with the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), on October 29-30, 2013, in Boston. Co-chairs of the workshop are Paul Belfanti (Director, Content Architecture, Pearson North America) and Markus Gylling (CTO, IDPF and DAISY Consortium.).
The goal of the workshop is to bring together major players in the global K-20 education market - including publishers, educators, platform and solution providers, standardisation organisations, content distributors, and accessibility organizations - to advance implementation of EPUB3, the HTML5 format developed by the IDPF, as the standard delivery format for e-textbooks. Participants will also emphasise the importance of broader adoption of other Open Web standards, such as CSS, QTI, and LTI, to enable the interoperability of education content across key platforms and systems.
As part of its business transformation strategy to standards-based, digital-first content creation, Pearson is developing EPUB3 output profiles, specifications that generate EPUB3 files tailored to criteria such as target audience, product type, target devices/platforms, learning standards, etc. Pearson will release one of these profiles as an open source output standard for basic educational content to provide a platform that all publishers, vendors, and content distributors can contribute to and use.
Prospective participants should submit a position paper or statement of interest by August 23, 2013. A preliminary list of possible workshop topics is available at idpf.org/edupub-2013-topics. For information on how to participate, visit the workshop site at idpf.org/edupub-2013.
EDUPUB's organisation co-sponsors are W3C and IMS Global Learning. Additional corporate sponsors include Aptara and SPi Global.
