AUGUST 2006

Adobe interview: Ali Hanyaloglu

'Go-to guy for Acrobat in Education'

by Kurt Foss, Editor, AcrobatUsers.com

Kurt Foss recently spoke with Ali Hanyaloglu (left), Technical Evangelist for Acrobat in Education at Adobe Systems. Ali started with Adobe in its London, England office on the marketing side 10 years ago. For the last six years, he’s been involved on the technical side with the sales team. “I'm pretty much the go-to guy for Acrobat in the educational market in North America,” he says in our interview, in which Ali describes his role and the use of Acrobat and PDF by teachers, students and administrators.

Foss: Briefly explain your current role and how you work with educational institutions at different levels, from K-12 schools to colleges and universities.

Hanyaloglu: "I help customers who are looking at the technology — looking to deploy or understand it better — by giving them the foundation knowledge and the details they need to move forward and implement it. It can involve going on site to give presentations, using Breeze to give online presentations, as well as getting involved with efforts like the Acrobat User Community and user-group chapters, contributing to whitepapers and things like that. I'm pretty much the go-to guy for Acrobat in the educational market in North America."

Foss: In what ways does Adobe work with educators and students — Higher Ed & K-12 — to promote and advance the use of Acrobat and PDF?

Hanyaloglu: "We do a number of things. Adobe’s Education website is the main place we send people because of all of the instructional materials that are up there for both learning and teaching the technology, and how to incorporate it into the classroom. We attend a lot of the key educational conferences, such as EDUCAUSE for Higher Ed and the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) for K-12.

We also work with a number of training companies to help develop small workshops that provide more specific training. And we produce and host a variety of online seminars. I visit a lot of major institutions and districts, for which we may offer either targeted presentations for specific groups or more general presentations with broad appeal across a campus. We'll get students, teachers, staff and IT people together and just 'talk Acrobat.'"

Foss: How can Acrobat help educators?

Hanyaloglu: "The key thing is it helps them to save time so they're not bogged down with paper-based processes and they can focus more on teaching. That's what I say I do: I help teachers teach. If I spend two hours and show them a bunch of things in Acrobat at a workshop or presentation, and they say 'You just saved me 13 minutes of time a day because I didn't have to recreate something or have to print it out and do things by hand,' then I've done my job."

Foss: What are some of the top Acrobat features and capabilities for education, and why?

Hanyaloglu: "The number one area of interest is forms. It's at two levels, the first of which is administrative forms — forms that drive the business of the school or campus. So much of what they currently do is still based on paper, exists as a spreadsheet on an administrative hard drive or uses some clunky Web form that was built a few years ago that has completely hit the wall. They want to move to electronic forms, but they either don't have the budget, resources or the time to implement a full, true workflow solution. I explain that they can get there and that Adobe can help with that with our LiveCycle solutions. But I also tell and show them 'Here's what you can do out of the box today with Acrobat 7 Professional.' I help them realize they can set up a simple, ad hoc electronic forms workflow and begin right away to eliminate some of the paper and the time involved.

Forms can also be implemented as different types of applications within education. If you think about a quiz, that's a form. There's no reason why they couldn't have teachers create simple quizzes using LiveCycle Designer or the older AcroForms tools, then send them out and get responses back by e-mail. On the higher education side, the LiveCycle server solutions — including Reader Extensions — are of more interest when you're dealing with student applications, financial aid forms and so on.

Security is another big area of interest right now because of concerns about things such as plagiarism, protection of intellectual property and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

Collaboration and Review is starting to gain traction. I've seen some good applications for it, but most people are not very aware of it yet. One school district is using it for teaching language and music skills. Students use the Audio Comment tool in Acrobat to record responses to a quiz, then include that in a PDF they send back to the teacher. In Acrobat 7 Professional, they show how to enable a PDF for commenting with the free Adobe Reader. The teacher can post homework to a website and students at home — even if they just have Reader — can add their audio comments and send them back via e-mail.

One of the most obvious classroom uses is students submitting their work as PDFs. It doesn't matter how they created them — there's no need for restrictions on what tools or fonts they use, or what kinds of content they include. They can submit that as a single PDF and teachers can use the markup tools to add their comments. As opposed to a standard review cycle where you would send back everything — the text-edit suggestions and so on – teachers can send back only a summary report with their original pages and their comments. The goal is for the students to actually apply the changes themselves, not have it done automatically through Acrobat."

Foss: I recall that electronic delivery of dissertations and theses (EDT) was one of the early educational applications of PDF. What's the status of that today?

Hanyaloglu: "Shelf space in libraries is becoming scarce and expensive, resulting in less room for hosting traditional published journals and creating greater demand for digital repositories that are publicly searchable and accessible. For many schools, their reputations are based on the quality of research they publish, how much of it is published, and is also tied into how much money they get through grants. The quicker they can get it published, the better. PDF has become the de facto standard for how those theses and dissertations are published.

The thing about ETDs that I've been talking about is how much more efficient schools can be — such as using and managing fully searchable metadata within the PDF file. I also ask about security needs. Are the published PDFs secure? Are educators and researchers controlling things, such as allowing users to extract content or restricting access to view and print only? Are they aware of how interactive PDF files can be? The easier it is for someone who is reading your thesis or dissertation to move around the document, the more compelling that document will be."

Foss: Related to that, are you seeing more rich-media applications in education?

Hanyaloglu: "Yes, students are creating content with a variety of tools, especially in the sciences, and in architecture and engineering. I'm getting a lot of interest in both 3D and other multimedia capabilities.

The other area where we're seeing greater interest in multimedia — in both K-12 and Higher Ed — is for electronic portfolios. Many schools have started to build and use electronic portfolio websites. We have a solution for that, too — called Contribute.

The challenge is: How do they share the different kinds of content they’re producing? It's the electronic equivalent of what they have been doing in the paper world — they compile their best documents, which can be fully interactive and include embedded movies, combine them into a single file, add security and then post it to a website, put it on a flash drive, e-mail it around and so on. In K-12, they're adopting Photoshop and Premiere Elements big time. PDF is really the only format in which they can bring all of that content together reliably and share it."

Foss: You speak at a number of educational conferences and seminars. I noticed that at a recent EDUCAUSE event you talked about "Avoiding a Digital Dark Age with PDF/A." Please explain briefly the use of and need for such document standards within the educational community.

Hanyaloglu: "I delivered an overview of what PDF/A is and talked about some specific educational applications where the benefits are especially important. One is student records, which in many cases need to be available and retrievable in their exact form for the life of the student. Many of these records exist as paper or are generated by some back-office system. PDF is being embraced as a format for student records.

The issue is: What kind of PDF are you using? What's in there and can you access that 50 years from now? That's where PDF/A comes in.

It's also important for ETDs. Research information needs to be available well into the future. A format that is guaranteed to be accessible well into the future is going to be key there. Other standards work such as PDF/X, PDF/E and PDF/UE are going to be equally important in higher education."

Foss: One feature in Acrobat 7 that you've discussed in conferences and in your Adobe blog as having particular usefulness is the commenting tools — ideal for highlighting and then summarizing comments to generate a new PDF. You also mention the use of a Tablet PC — do you find a greater use of Tablet PCs in education, and what advantages or special capabilities does that offer?

Hanyaloglu: “I have a Tablet PC and it's a joy to use. Using the pen to tap on the screen is just a much nicer way of working. Looks like paper, and with the pen, you're actually highlighting text — it works just like using a traditional yellow highlighter, so it feels like paper, too.

Education and health care are the two areas where vendors have seen Tablet PCs being embraced. Some schools have actually deployed Tablets. I think it can be more engaging for students. And when they're more engaged, they learn more."

Foss: What are a couple other noteworthy Acrobat and PDF-based educational projects?

Hanyaloglu: "One of my favorite case studies on Adobe.com is where the superintendent of a small school district in rural Texas (Medina) explains how they are using Acrobat out of the box and PDF forms for all of their administrative and reporting processes. He says 'Look, we're a small school district and we're doing these things with PDF forms. If we're doing it, anybody can.'

Another personal favorite is the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. They're on the leading edge when it comes to using Acrobat and PDF technology. They were one of the first adopters of the technology, and are now using it with their Spike portal that allows students to submit their work electronically. Wharton has built a whole review cycle based around using Acrobat.”

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