Develop Digital Content
ePP is expert in all phases of content development from idea to ingestion.
Product Planning, Instructional Design, and Prototyping
ePP has partnered with some of the biggest names in education to plan and produce professional development courses to help educators around the world stay ahead of and on top of their ever-changing field. These images offer a glimpse into the first steps of producing a course: storyboarding (top row) and producing vibrant, engaging slides (bottom row) for a digital course.
Our math team worked side-by-side with our client to develop interactive instructional content for elementary math. We created CCSS-aligned lessons with a high level of student engagement, starting with research deep dive and context brainstorming and moving through rounds of increasingly detailed outlines, storyboards, and scripts with character dialogue, such as this one.
ePP created this interactive for a professional development course aimed at helping educators better understand how to best set up and utilize the classroom space to maximize student learning, engagement, and collaboration. In this interactive, the user must arrange students’ desks to best support a chosen activity or lesson.
Our team proposed an instructional design for a brand new professional development product. We were guided by our philosophy that instructors are also learners and that they benefit from the same principles and strategies as students. As part of the same effort, we created wireframes and developed accompanying content.
ePP partnered with two non-profits to prototype, spec, write, and storyboard three lesson plans—including facilitator, teacher, and student content and multimedia—around a social and emotional learning (SEL) topic. Each lesson plan was customized for different age groups within elementary and lower middle grades.
Blueprinting and Roadmapping
Our client asked us to map existing CCSS Learnosity K–12 math assessment items to the new FL B.E.S.T. standards and then to blueprint new item sets to fill in gaps. We blueprinted both to the standards and content constraints, as well as the client's core course content.
ePP is proud to partner with a client from a project’s onset to its completion. ePP’s SME project directors use their pedagogical expertise to map a course and then develop a detailed storyboard for each unit of that course, ensuring that each one creates and then builds upon a solid foundation of comprehension. This work includes developing any resources needed for instruction, including PDFs, animation and/or video scripts, and photo/art specs.
In our experience, the first step to creating a successful digital course is to create a roadmap. This might include learning objective development, content outline, and draft art and media specifications. This particular example is for a virtual PD course.
Writing, Including Assessment, Student- and Teacher-facing Content, and Professional Development
ePP was tasked by Google Arts & Culture with creating lessons focusing on culture and the arts using resources we selected from a vast image archive. This lesson asks students to consider the ways in which paintings made by Latino artists around the world express a shared Latino culture.
ePP was invited to analyze numerous pieces of literature featured in curricula across the nation and produce comprehensive study guides for each work. Our writers chose vital elements of each piece, such as symbols, allusions, and important quotations, and produced in-depth analysis of each aimed at deepening students’ comprehension and enhancing their reading experience. Our deliveries utilized HTML coding to ensure an accurate and seamless ingestion into the client’s platform.
ePP developed interactive games for a product in which students create a Hamilton-style "musical" based on primary sources from an event in civics history. ePP researched primary sources and distractors and wrote a plot summary, game questions and feedback, and "reviews" encompassing different historical viewpoints on the event.
When it comes to authoring algorithmic items, our team knows when it’s appropriate to iterate a variable and how to meticulously define related variables in an item across the stem, answer choices, and feedback to prevent the item from generating a set of impossible or otherwise undesirable values. This is the student view of an algorithmic math item we authored in ExamView.
ePP believes that learning is a lifelong journey. While ePP’s main focus is on educational materials for grades K–12, we also have vast experience planning and producing professional development aimed at helping educators become the best they can be. Here’s part of a storyboard we developed for a course about differentiated instruction.
In addition to program-specific practice and assessment, ePP develops high stakes and program-agnostic and CCR standardized test items and test prep materials. This is an example of one of many AP study guides and student support resources we’ve developed.
ePP has partnered with many clients to help plan, build, and refine professional development courses for educational professionals. We have been tasked with taking existing face-to-face courses and transforming them into lively, engaging digital courses. Here is an example of a storyboard of one such project.
We have experience blueprinting and writing practice tests for the AP Exam and ACT Test for ELA, reading, writing, math, science, literature & composition, and history. This includes sourcing and writing new passages and data; speccing and creating images; and writing student- and teacher-facing rationales and explanations.
ePP was asked to write, spec, storyboard, and produce a proof-of-concept short, engaging, topic-specific live action video for high school ELA. It became apparent that full live action was not going to be possible within the client’s budget for the entire project, so we created this video that has a live action feel on an animation budget.
We have been curating educational virtual and augmented reality content since 2015. Our tasks have included speccing new panoramic images; searching Google Street View for existing images; selecting points of interest on each panorama; writing descriptions of each panorama and associated points of interest; and writing leveled assessment questions.
We partnered with this client to reimagine a Grades K–1 print math program for online use, which was particularly challenging given the limited dexterity and digital fluency of that age group. This is the storyboard for one lesson, which contains all instruction; audio scripts; metadata including target standards, DOK, and difficulty level; art and interactivity specs and scrap; and file names and art codes.
In addition to student content development, we are often asked to produce, refine, and review materials for educators and other adult learners. ePP was asked to produce study guides for a number of DSST exams, such as this one.
Creating Metadata
Due to the nature of digital content, almost every project we do involves developing robust metadata. In this case, we developed Learnosity items and metadata such as Depth of Knowledge (DOK), difficulty level, content standard GUID, Standards for Mathematical Practice, grade level, tech-enhanced item type, and quiz number.
This project involved picking up or revising existing assessment items for a literature program and using the metadata fields to associate the items with a new program. This image illustrates the many different metadata fields required, including difficulty level, topic, and national and state standards.
We developed and built test prep items for math grades K–12 for use both in print and digitally. This spreadsheet is the metadata spreadsheet we created as we wrote the items to enable ingestion into the platform.
Revising and Updating Legacy Content for New or Upgraded Systems
We often work with our clients to update their content when they have switched or significantly upgraded their platform. In this case, we reviewed content objects on the legacy platform and updated the build templates to revise content that would not function on the new platform or that would be better served using newly-introduced functionality.
A major publisher contracted with ePP to repurpose legacy content for their new literature program. This spreadsheet is the course creation spreadsheet that we created to map the legacy content to a new framework and tag assessment to remediation assets.
ePP is often asked to help revamp and transform existing curricula to elevate the content and delivery method to best suit the role technology plays in today’s ever-evolving classroom. For this project, ePP took existing student- and teacher-facing materials and produced interactive slides that could be completed by students individually or as a class. We created and integrated Pear Deck activities for each lesson to add a new level of interactivity and engagement.
Auditing and Curating Existing Content
ePP performed a detailed bias and sensitivity review of an educational publisher’s legacy content and art. As a basis for the review, we collaborated with our client to develop a list of overarching categories of concern—for example, egregious departures from current teaching practices, outdated references, and stereotypes—and the criteria for identifying them. We also provided remediation suggestions.
Although we fact check all of our work, we are also sometimes asked to provide fact-checking as a service. In this case, our client sent us first drafts of articles written by their writers for us to copyedit, fact check, and review for adherence to guidelines and correct template usage.
Making Content and Media Accessible, Including Writing Alt Text, Long Description, and Audio and Visual Description and Reviewing Closed Captioning
We have extensive experience developing alt text and long descriptions for images to support visually impaired learners in all grades and disciplines. As always, we took special care when developing this elementary reading content to consider the grade level and vocabulary comprehension of the target student audience.
After our client had approved the alt text, long descriptions, and null attributes our team had developed, we added that content to our client's proprietary LMS. Then we QA-ed each element by proofreading and using a screen reader program we know is commonly used in schools to confirm the desired output.
As with static alt text, subject matter and pedagogical expertise are critical when crafting audio and visual description. In addition to considering the unique purpose and context of each video, it is crucial to consider cognitive load and the use case of each type of description.
For this project, our math team reviewed a high school math ePub and, based on our experience and WCAG guidance, we evaluated the context and purpose of each image to identify whether it needed alt text. We then developed alt text and long descriptions in a spreadsheet, which was our client’s preferred format.
ePP is dedicated to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging; equity among all learners is in the forefront of our minds as we develop content. Over the years, we’ve helped produce, edit, and adjust closed captioning (as seen here) and audio description for educational videos.
Subject matter and pedagogical expertise are critical when crafting a description of the image for learners to envision in their mind. In addition to considering the unique purpose and context of each image, it is crucial to consider the diverse spectrum of seen experience. For example, we would be doing learners a disservice by assuming they can envision dice, and so our visual storytelling requires thoughtful groundwork.
Aligning and/or Crosswalking Content and Performing Gap Analyses
Our client asked us to analyze the K–12 ELA and math standards of 23 states and to use the data to create a proprietary skills hierarchy for each discipline and grade for their internal use tagging assets. This is one of our working spreadsheets, which we used to create global strands and skills tagged back to individual state standards.
This client created an innovative career-based middle school math program and asked our team to collaborate with them on content blueprinting. Our math team assigned each unit to a real-world career cluster that was applicable to the math in each lesson, correlated career clusters to modules across the grades, and ensured full coverage of CCSS via the proprietary learning objectives.
This client needed to crosswalk individual standards to their own proprietary skills hierarchy so that the assets currently tagged to standards would inherit the skill alignments. This spreadsheet created the alignments in the platform.
Our client asked us to perform a gap analysis for Texas on an existing National digital science course to determine where coverage was lacking. Once we identified gaps, we outlined, specced, and storyboarded new digital learning objects to fill them.