Challenges

• This was a first of its kind series for the CUP ESL department. We partnered with Discovery Education and suddenly had access to thousands of hours of video content. We unwound our usual development workflow of first creating stories and exercises based off of them and instead used Discovery’s video collection to determine the topics for the readers.

• Each reader had between 25 and 30 images. We had access to a portion of Discovery’s photo archive, but it was insufficient to meet the needs of our program. The cost to license 2,400+ from agencies was far beyond our budget. I proposed splitting the licensing fee across two other series projects in development, allowing us to stay within budget, and allowing them access to vast photography collections for their projects. Up to this point, budgets had been planned in project silos; this approach signaled a new approach to budgeting within the department.

• Scheduling for this series was tricky not only because of the new workflow, but because of the sheer number of readers we were simultaneously producing. I batched it in nine groups of 10, and a final batch of six to 17 different authors.