Paper Is A Dead End In Digital Education, Here Comes The Solution

Everyone should have access to high-quality learning content, whether through paper books or smartphones.

Hard copy textbooks have their perks, no doubt. You can scribble in them, hide notes from your crush and the fat chemistry book is perfect for weight training.

The problem is that paper is a bit of a dead-end in our digital world: no interactivity, no content sharing, unsuitable for distance learning, no searching, filtering, tagging…

Why is paper still so popular? Well, it’s probably a question of habit (regardless of deforestation and climate change…). But moreover: there simply hasn’t been a real alternative.

Paper is the Gilded Cage of Knowledge 🔐

One of the pitfalls of paper-based learning is the lack of interactivity and therefore its unsuitability for distance learning. But there is another issue.

Today, the great merit of paper in making knowledge transportable has turned into its opposite:

true knowledge is trapped in books.

Those who do not have access to books cannot benefit from the “treasure of knowledge ” they contain. As a result, high-quality education is still not within reach for a large part of humanity (UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report).

Digital Paper (PDF) Is Not The Answer 😖

As the digitalization of learning content is essential for a better distance learning experience, many attempts have been made to digitize textbooks.

So far, most efforts have focused on “squeezing” existing textbooks 1:1 into “digital paper” like PDF (same layout, same structure, same exercises…).

But PDF does not work for interactive learning content, such as quizzes. Learning material is mostly created with the layout in mind first. This results in well-designed but “dumb” PDFs and makes displaying the content on mobile phones very difficult. That’s why little of the educational content is digitally accessible.

That needs to change, don’t you think?

The Solution: Embracing “Content-First” 📖👩‍💻📲

The solution is to structure the data in an uncompromising “content-first” approach. This means breaking down the content of a textbook into small, self-contained “learning bits” suitable for mobile screens and leaving the graphical representation of these bits entirely up to the e-book readers and learning app.

Content-first has significant advantages over digital paper such as mobile-friendliness as it is accessible on every device, is highly interactive, and easy to analyze for content creators.

The Rise of New Digital Learning Experiences 🦸🏼‍♀️🤖👩🏻‍🚀🎓

Being mobile-friendly, interactive, searchable, and shareable “content-first” textbooks facilitates modern forms of teaching, such as blended learning.

Content-first also enables entirely new didactic approaches, such as the creation of smartbooks, which offer individual study paths based on the learning progress or AI-supported correction suggestions for teachers.

From Static Content Trapped On Paper To Interactive Learning Opportunities On Every Device 🚀

The long journey of the textbook into the digital age — from paper to digital paper, to content-first is not quite over yet.

BUT there is now a shared basis for creating truly digitized learning content.

It is called “bitmark”.

The open-source standard bitmark is uncompromisingly mobile-first and content-first. bitmark aims to simplify and accelerate the creation, sharing, and dissemination of digitized learning content.

bitmark describes the meaning of the content, not what it looks like. Computers are so empowered to understand the learning material and make something useful of it: Provide individual learning paths, give the right feedback at the right time, and much more. Also, complex layout information is no longer required. Instead, the optimal display is enabled by the content’s metadata. That’s content-first.

From PDF to interactive learning with bitmark

By breaking the content down into small effective learning nuggets it is easy to write & read for developers, simple to produce for content creators, convenient to recycle for learning module composers, and accessible on every device for learners.

bitmark is not only for publishers and content creators but also offers an open solution for EdTech companies such as Taskbase, Get More Brain, Classtime and more.

bitmark offers the foundation, you create the impact.

To Fix Education We Need To Have A Common Ground 🌏

In the education sector, everyone works on their own with loads of papers, files, pictures, and various tools and platforms simultaneously. The absence of a common ground for all is limiting the progress in education. To fix digital education we need to have a common data standard.

That’s why bitmark is the world’s only strictly content-first open-source standard for creating learning content. Finally learning content can be easily digitalized, widespread, and made accessible for everyone.

By providing a standard, a common ground, for digital education, we can make education accessible for everyone and enable social and economic participation for youth, women, and deprived communities.

Become a Supporter of the bitmark Association and help us close the education gap in the world 🙌

Have a look at the documentation of the bitmark standard: https://docs.bitmark.cloud/