Innovation at Cambridge

Innovation 
Noun 
'the development of new products, designs, or ideas'
Cambridge Dictionary

By collaborating, creating and listening, we’ll keep innovating and finding new ways of doing things to maximise the impact we have. Throughout 2021 we developed innovative products and services that are relevant, exciting and inspiring. This included developing games for English language learning, launching a unique suite of professional development packages for educators, calculating our digital carbon footprint and publishing the most innovative new dictionary of ancient Greek in almost 200 years.  

Strong, resilient and flexible platforms are the foundations of the best digital products, and we continue to make progress across all our areas of assessment, publishing and research to provide richer, more seamless and personalised teaching and learning environments. As we begin a new year, we’re reflecting on some of the innovative products, services and achievements from the last year, all designed to better support the millions of learners, teachers and researchers we serve around the world. 

Gaming for learning   

According to a 2019 report by Internet Matters, half of parents worry their child will become addicted to games. Research from Cambridge has found, however, that gaming can be a very effective way for children to learn.  

Responding to the market and user needs, our English Language Teaching team has developed four new games games to help children develop their English skills. Due for release in 2022, they will support collaboration in the classroom and motivate and challenge students to instil confidence in their performance.  

"Online games have been a core part of the digital experience for schools for some time. What makes Cambridge different is we focus on user research in the field, to find out what are the most effective interactions for language development. Our findings are then put directly into new product development,” Sharon Duan, platform manager for our English Language Teaching (ELT) products explains. 

A game already helping hundreds of thousands of children learn English at home is the award-winning Minecraft world, Adventures in English with Cambridge. This new world helps young learners practise their English skills with a focus on real-life communication and vocabulary skills, enabling children to learn new words, get creative and solve problems through the power of play. It has been designed by experts at Cambridge Assessment English in collaboration with Microsoft, and at the end of 2021 won gold in the K12 category at the Reimagine Education awards, the largest awards programme for educational innovators around the world.  

“There are lots of learning games in the market, so we wanted to create something that truly enabled a high level of learning and engagement to motivate and inspire children of all ages,” says head of digital partnerships at Cambridge Assessment English, Belinda Cerdá. “We’ve done this by combining the power and global appeal of Minecraft with Cambridge expertise in language learning.” The world is now the first education game available to buy on the Minecraft Marketplace.  It was played more than 350,000 times in more than 200 countries during the pilot phase in 2021. 

The Falaj Project 

As schools locked down last year to tackle the spread of Covid-19, the use of education technology rocketed. However, increased use of technology did not always result in successful learning outcomes for students. Cambridge has been working with education officials in Oman since 2017 to implement a new maths and science curriculum that focuses on student-centred, active learning.  

The project is named after Oman’s Falaj system – where channels of water flow efficiently around the country, just as an effective digital teaching approach could flow throughout schools. 

When the pandemic hit, many teachers faced challenges in continuing this effective new approach when working online. Omani teachers had access to Google Workspace for Education, thanks to a national programme in 2020, as well as digital versions of Cambridge textbooks. However, these resources were not suitable for use together.  

The Falaj Project, a collaboration between Cambridge Partnership for Education, Google for Education, and the Ministry of Education in Oman, looked into how to solve this, enabling students to take lessons at home that fit the curriculum.  

Project collaborators conducted a series of live workshops with teachers and an international research review. They also developed unique resource prototypes. The project report outlines key findings, as well as recommendations for positive next steps for the future.  

Calculating our digital carbon footprint 

At Cambridge University Press & Assessment, we are committed to reducing our environmental impact across all areas of our operations, and as we increasingly move towards digital delivery, we are aware of our responsibility to do so in a sustainable way. We are investigating the carbon footprint of our digital products and ways we could lower this footprint by improving our products.  

In late 2020, we started trialling a new tool, DIMPACT, derived from ’digital’ and ‘impact’, to explore how it could be used to calculate the carbon footprint of academic publishing. The tool helped us to identify that around 90% of our emissions in 2020 came from end users – people using our digital products on their devices. Digging deeper, we found a large proportion of customers using our products are based in countries that have few green energy sources.  

Overall, we’ve identified areas where real action can be taken to create more sustainable digital products for our researchers, learners, teachers and parents. Read more about our journey to understand and quantify the impact of our digital operations. 

Landmark Greek lexicon  

In a major milestone for scholarly publishing, Cambridge University Press released the most innovative new dictionary of ancient Greek in almost 200 years. The two-volume Cambridge Greek Lexicon is an important reference work for scholars and an indispensable one for classics students. Stephen Fry, an actor and author of works about ancient Greece, was an early and enthusiastic customer. 

The dictionary is the result of 23 years’ work by a team from the Cambridge Classics faculty, led by Professor James Diggle, its Editor-in-Chief. It provides fresh definitions and translations in contemporary English, gleaned from the formidable task of re-reading all surviving Ancient Greek literature, from its foundations in Homer through to the early second century AD. Helped by online databases that made the corpus more easily accessible and searchable, the team pored over every word, working steadily through the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet to build up a clear, modern and accessible guide to the meanings of Ancient Greek words and their development in different contexts and authors. 

Flip it Open 

Making research open access – that is, freely available for anyone to read and use - is one of the ways we spread knowledge, spark curiosity and aid understanding around the world. In June 2021, Cambridge University Press launched an innovative open access pilot project for academic books. The initiative, called Flip it Open, will make selected books freely available online once they pass a set amount of sales revenue.  

The titles most in demand will be made Open Access first, giving authors greater impact for their research without paying publishing fees. Director of books publishing at Cambridge University Press, Ben Denne, said: “We are saying that sought-after titles are the books that should be freely available first, because they are the ones that most people are likely to want to access.” 

Professional development packages for educators 

Supporting teachers is central to our approach to education. In 2021, we introduced a unique range of professional development services to go with the launch of our Cambridge Primary and Lower Secondary project - the biggest publishing programme ever carried out within our education team.  

The new materials reflect our strategy of “going beyond the textbook”, with curriculum content supported by professional development services, expert and community created teacher resources, and feedback from data which helps teachers plan their next steps in the classroom. As Education product marketing executive, Laura Rogers, explains: “Teachers want to feel confident using our new resources and applying key teaching approaches, in order to provide better learning for every student.” The project incorporates insights from our online research panel of more than 800 educators and thinkers, as well as teachers working in classrooms around the world. 

The professional development innovations include training courses which senior teachers can customise to their school’s circumstances and cascade down to staff; a teaching skills roadmap which covers the know-how needed to deliver Cambridge programmes and includes a library of video footage showing second language teachers in second language classrooms; and a support service which allows teachers unlimited access to mentors. 

Digital high stakes assessment   

Our digital high stakes programme works across OCR and Cambridge International to develop digital assessments. Read more about what we mean by digital and how that impacts assessment in this blog. The team has brought four trial products to customers since being set up in April 2021. Offering on-screen IGCSE progression tests and topic tests for GSCE and A Levels is part of our strategy to make assessments digital with the aims of:

• improving accessibility for a diversity of learners, not just those with specific needs
• releasing teacher time, for example, by using auto-marking
• providing rich data which can be used to support teaching and learning
• recognising the digital literacy of learners – who were born in the internet era.

We are also working with teachers to transform assessments, curriculum and learning for the future – which are designed to:

• assess constructs not possible using traditional methods, for example, collaboration, communication and research skills
• use interactive tools which engage learners
• and, potentially, use adaptive assessments to increase efficiency and target individual learners’ abilities.

Taking this digital approach puts the users (in this case teachers and learners) first and continually checks we are meeting their needs. We start small, and iterate based on user feedback, test assumptions and build incrementally.  

The future  

As we begin our first full year as one organisation, with greater scale and a single strategy, Cambridge University Press & Assessment will be able to invest effectively in creating the very best products and services to support learning and research around the world.