Creating Discoverable Learning Content Using a User-Friendly Authoring Environment

Digital learning content is becoming more and more commonplace. However, the creation of this learning content is usually done in specialized publishing platforms, that may lock in the content. This prevents the learning content from being discovered automatically, and hinders its uptake. A more general approach for authoring discoverable learning content is needed. We built a user-friendly authoring environment for creating digital publications, enriched with multimedia and interactivity features. This authoring environment outputs the created content in open formats, independent of any publishing platform. We adjusted our authoring environment to create semantically enriched learning content using the RDFa syntax, without the need for manual intervention. In this paper, we show how well-structured and well-annotated digital learning content can be created and validated using our authoring environment. The result is a discoverable publication in an open format, ready to be distributed as is, or ready to be imported in existing publishing platforms.