In Realizeit, “content” is considered to be both learning materials and assessment items. Content can be created natively in the Realizeit authoring tool, or it can be imported from existing digital sources. The import of content is referred to as “ingestion”. Post-ingestion the content can be manipulated in the system using the authoring tool, as required. The ingestion process originated with a desire to use existing material with an intelligent and adaptive engine, and to provide an automated process to allow this to happen.
To further develop the Realizeit ingestion capabilities, ingestion templates have been introduced. An ingestion template is a definition of how embedded instructions in a Microsoft Word document containing content should be processed during ingestion. Rich, interactive content can be created rapidly using an ingestion template. The instructions can be transformed to features such as blockquotes, comments, titles, headings, lightboxes, links, images, videos, accordions, slideshows, tabbed interfaces and image citation lists. Further, special types allow for different section types, popups, glossaries and single questions (interactions) to be defined and processed. Special types allow for the full range of different question types to be defined and processed. The user is prompted for the expected variables for each individual question type.
The ingestion template specifies the specific text or characters in the Word document that correspond to an instruction. The data can be provided inline or in a table in the Word document. Variables are defined to store data and calculate values. These variables are then combined into the output HTML that will exist in Realizeit. Instructions can be nested. (Global variables are available to share values across individual instructions.)
Associating an order with each instruction allows the system to determine the order in which the instructions should be processed.