MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

As part of the PublishOER project I spent last Friday afternoon looking into whether an ePub file could be imported into Dynamic Learning Maps (DLMs), in order to map ePub content to specific parts of a curriculum.

Export before import

I started by expanding my inspecting ePub files work to add a simple export function. The export function is based on the inspect code and outputs an xml file (metadata) and folder of html resources (chapters). Exporting to a cleaner format with most of ePub specific content removed allowed me to reuse one of DLMs existing import functions, rather than creating a complicated ePub specific import function.

Importing into DLMs

The results below show a sample ePub file provided by Elsevier successfully imported into DLMs. Using a slightly modified version of a DLMs import script, which maps the metadata to a parent node and the chapters as child nodes. The HTML content of the chapter is inserted as a node description, which can be viewed on selecting a node.

ePub file imported into DLMs, with chapters as DLM nodes:

Chapter 1 as a node:

Chapter 1 with chapter text as the node description (expanded via “show more” from above image):

With the chapters imported it would be possible to map to other nodes within DLMs including the core curriculum. This would allow the chapter to be presented to the student at the most appropriate time.

Using the ePub chapter inspector it would also be possible to add the ePub version of the chapter as a node resource, which a student could download.

Textbook content ©2010 Saunders/Elsevier. Authors: Otto M. Radostits CM DVM MSc MRCVS Dipl ACVIM, Clive C. Gay DVM MVSc Hon DVSc FACVSc Hon Diplomate ACVIM, Douglas C. Blood OBE BVSc MVSc Hon LLD Hon DVSc HonAssocRCVS FACVSc, Kenneth W. Hinchcliff BVSc(Hons) MS PhD Dipl ACVIM. To purchase: http://amzn.to/MBPTYd. All rights reserved. Used with permission.