Knowledge and Learning (K&L) is a new product in the BBC Online portfolio.

When complete, it will exist as a standalone property while also connecting related content across the other nine BBC products. It will pull together over 100 existing BBC websites from Bitesize to Food to Science to History and bring them into a single, consistent user experience.

The vision is to channel inspiration from across the BBC and the world around us to spark our audience's natural curiosity and establish a positive relationship with learning.

Learning journeys based on the Thames Barrier

The new product is making a promise that is firmly rooted in the BBC's mission to Inform, Educate and Entertain. To meet this promise requires moving from the current portfolio of individual web sites to a single product with a central production system and innovative new content formats.

The content currently produced by the editorial team in K&L ranges from formal learning formats (revision guides for students, guides for adult learners, and BBC programme clips to be used by teachers in classrooms) to topical features around arts, food, science, history and health.

We are now in the process of redefining the way that our audiences consume that educational and factual content. We believe that technology combined with storytelling broadens horizons for our audience. We hope the new product will satisfy our audience's appetite for topical content in an experience that is optimised for learning.

Below are some of the challenges that the team faces in building its longer-term vision, and some scenarios and themes that those attending our Connected Studio could help us explore.

Key opportunities: audience and product

The Knowledge & Learning audience is large, diverse and ever-changing. We cater for school-aged children revising for their exams, empty nesters seeking more information about the birds in their hedgerows and almost everyone in between.

But one constant is that our audiences are all in some way open to learning. Finding ever more inventive ways to pique our audience's natural curiosity is the K&L product's principal challenge.

At this stage in development we're searching for innovative content formats, tools and user experiences. The challenges we have set out here provide a chance to contribute to fundamental elements of the future K&L product.

1. A K&L interactive video player

We have content around a large range of topics, places, people, events and fields of study. We now have the technology (as seen in the Olympics) to combine video and data to deliver statistical overlays, chapterised content and social elements to the video experience.

How should we design a player for people to consume our video content in the way that best sparks their curiosity and allows them to follow where it leads them?

We need to cater for a range of needs, from searching for a specific answer to allowing people to follow interesting links and relationships between topics.

How could this player offer a unique learning experience that is as immersive as it is useful? This is different to a second-screen experience - what we want to explore are ways to deliver a more immersive first-screen experience.

Content based on topical news stories

2. Doing, not just viewing

People learn better by doing and we would like the K&L product to include an opportunity for playful "practice" - activities designed to reinforce learning without feeling onerous.

How do we bring a level of interaction to our audiences that would mean their experience is more enjoyable, their learning is better absorbed and their curiosity is better sparked in order to continue learning more?

An interactive guide format with modular and 'stackable' content forms the building blocks of the new K&L Product. Each piece we create will be a single unit, the smallest unit of knowledge appropriate for a single step in a learning journey. Each unit will be consumed or completed in three to four minutes, is viewable on any device and is heavily wrapped in metadata so that it can easily be connected to any other unit of knowledge content.

We don't have the time or resource to 'reinvent the wheel' for each guide so it's important these interactive elements are designed to scale across the broad range of K&L topics and audiences. How can we create reusable patterns of interactivity to reduce the time it takes us to create activities?

3. Connecting the TV experience with K&L

A large proportion of our audience watch or listen to factual content without benefiting from the wealth of related content online. We know our audience are open to learning but don't want to be distracted from the content they are already enjoying.

How might people signal to us that they are interested in learning more during a broadcast of TV or radio content? How do we help them follow their curiosity without interrupting the original content?

4. Connecting the real world with Knowledge & Learning

More and more, people expect to see what they do in the real world reflected in their online world and vice versa.

How can our audiences easily track digitally what they do in the real world (e.g. trips to a museum, real world Stargazing Live activities, baking a cake, helping friends revise, etc), and then use that information to enrich their learning experience? What will they see when they go to BBC spaces online which represent the real world? And, how might these digital spaces change the way they experience real world events?

I will be at the Knowledge & Learning Connected Studio with the K&L team. We are very excited to see what ideas come from the community of designers, technologists and storytellers and look forward to seeing some of you in February.

Andy Pipes is executive product manager for BBC Knowledge & Learning.

N.B. The images used in this post are early concept designs only and not finished products.

The BBC Sport website will tell the story of this year's Olympic Games with over 10,000 pages of content about the events, countries and athletes taking part.

How do you keep on top of all the news, schedules and stats about the people and activities that interest you most when the occasion is in full swing?

We hope Favourites allows you to do just that.

When you're browsing the new Olympics web site, you will notice light grey "plus" symbols next to important names: athletes such as Rebecca Adlington, collections of events such as Table Tennis, specific events such as the Women's Pole Vault, and competing countries like Team GB.

These plus symbols are a way into a simple but smart bookmarking system.

Roll over the plus symbol, and you'll see the text "Add to Favourites" appear in green. Click on this text, and you're telling us that you'd like that person or thing to be added to your personal list of items to keep track of.

The Favourites Tray

The tray displays the latest headline for each of up to five favourites, as well as links to their pages on the site. The favourites tray follows you around the BBC Sport site, so that you can check in and see what's new for your favourites whilst you're reading a story, or watching a video.

If you've already added five items, and attempt to follow a sixth by pressing the Add to Favourites button, a menu will appear asking you which of your existing favourites you'd like to replace with the new one.

Your Favourites Page

The favourites tray also contains a link to a personalised page. Click on the link saying Favourites Page. Here, you'll receive more news from your favourites, links to share your favourites activity with your social network friends, and a special detail panel that updates throughout the Games.

Each type of item - be it person, place or activity - is displayed in your favourites page alongside the most relevant stats for that subject.

Athletes

Before the Olympics has started, if you've selected an athlete for your favourites, you'll see the start date of the first of their events listed in the detail panel, so you will know when they will get out of the blocks. Then, during the Games, the detail panel will list out all of your athletes' results, including medals.

Countries

If you support a national team, when you select them as a favourite, the detail panel will - up to the start of the Games - display the medal totals for that team in Beijing 2008 as well as surface their top medal sport four years ago. During the Games, the medal counts are replaced by live medal tallies, and top medal sports for London 2012.

Collection of events (e.g. Swimming)

Before the Games, your detail panel will show you a few facts: when that sport starts in July or August, and which country took its top honours in the Beijing Games. During the London Games, this detail panel transforms into a mini-schedule for that sport, displaying its 3 upcoming events. And after all the events in that sport are complete, the detail panel will show which country or countries performed best this year.

Specific event (e.g. Women's 3m Springboard)

Before the event kicks off, the detail panel shows two items - a countdown clock to the first day of the event, and the athlete or team who won the event in Beijing four years ago.

Then, as the event gets into full swing, the detail panel will tell you exactly which rounds or matches of the event are coming up next. Then, when all the action is over in that event, the favourites page will display the medalists alongside the latest news for the event.

I hope that you explore this new feature in the run-up to the Games, and use it as an integral piece of your Olympics experience on the BBC Sport website.

Please let me know in the comments your thoughts on the service, and how we might improve it in future releases.

Andrew Pipes is Senior Product Manager, Sport & Olympics 2012, BBC Future Media

New format medal table, showing the 2008 medal tallies

Hi, I'm Andy Pipes, and I work with Cait O'Riordan on the London 2012 programme for BBC Future Media. Specifically, I lead the development of the Olympics area within the Sport website.

Last month, we announced the arrival of some of our new pages, such as key athletes, countries, and events at the London 2012 Olympic Games, and this month we are rolling out some more new features.

The medals table proved to be one of the most popular pages on the BBC Sport web site during the Beijing 2008 Olympics, with almost 20% of the total traffic. For 2012, we're aiming to make this an even more rewarding experience for the audience, and ensure there are plenty of opportunities for onward journeys to our country and athlete pages.

This month we've redesigned the old Beijing table to bring it in line with our new look (above). Currently it solely concentrates on the countries awarded medals but, during the 2012 Games, we'll have a version that lists the medalists alongside the countries.

We've displayed the information we collected about Beijing across the new site. Browse to a country which won a medal at the 2008 Games, for instance, and you'll find out which events they excelled at in Beijing. Plus, look out soon for a playful visualisation of countries' top medal performances at the Games, going back all the way to 1896.

Ones to Watch

This year's Olympic Games will feature more than 10,000 competing athletes, 200 countries and 304 medal contests, which represents a wealth of fantastic content. We don't want our audience to miss any of it. In this release we're bringing more attention to our coverage of the world's highest-profile athletes. There are now specific pages of athletes for every sport and country. On those pages, you'll also see which athletes are current Olympic or World Record holders.

On athlete pages, such as Rebecca Adlington's, you'll now see links to team-mates for their sport. We've added a "ones to watch" carousel of athletes on country pages, like on Team USA and of course Team GB. Select a sport from the carousel's drop-down to see the medal hopes for each event, or visit the sport pages (e.g. sailing) to see who Britain hopes to see on the podium this summer.

Something people in our audience testing sessions told us they would like for a big event like this are tidbits of trivia around the Games. With this in mind, we're developing an experience that will give our audience the chance to compare athletes' and countries' key stats. On some event pages, such the men's 100m page, you'll now be able to compare the performances of some of the world's best athletes in that sport using our "head to head" widget. You can see how many medals they've won over the years, and their best times and distances compared with their peers.

This complements a feature on some country pages which allows you to compare countries' performances over the past two Olympic Games.

Event Listings

Want to know quickly which medal-winning events make up a particular sport, say athletics? Have a glance at our event listings pages. In this table, you've got an all-in-one summary of who won the gold in Beijing, what day the event starts in 2012, and the current world record in the event. During the Games, this table will update with the medal winners, as well as the latest headlines for each event from BBC Sport.

Event Listings

Hopefully you'll spot some useful design tweaks to our sport and country pages too. They now benefit from a new large-format picture gallery to bring the drama of the Olympics to life.

Our event pages, like Rebecca Adlington's women's 400m freestyle, now contain news links to their related events, so that the user doesn't have to go back and forth between the sport category pages and the event pages to find out the latest stories from a given discipline.

Accessibility

Ensuring our content is available and easy to access for all our audiences is one of BBC Online's guiding principles. We have worked hard to guarantee that users of screenreaders can get to their favourite content quickly, and that users with Javascript turned off still have access to all key content on our pages. This is true even for more complicated features like expanding table content, or our "head to head" widget that allows users to compare performances of top athletes. Every piece of content on the site can also be accessed from the keyboard via tabs. We also made sure that screen readers have access to new content that is inserted into the page after the initial page load by updating the virtual buffer.

Microdata & the semantic publishing platform

Embedding semantic meaning into our HTML mark-up with microdata helps search engines and other services to better understand our site's content. For instance, by inserting some structured information about the person into Usain Bolt's page, we are allowing search engines to show more detailed information about him in results, such as the athlete's team, image, age, and association with the Olympics. For events such as the men's 100m competition, we can embed specific dates in the code to tell services when the races begin.

These are just two examples of ways we are working towards our goal of being one of the most semantically advanced services on the web, following on from what we did with the Vancouver Winter Games and World Cup websites, the latter winning industry praise for its use of RDF and open-linked data.

The pages that our audience see on the London 2012 website aggregate content produced by the BBC Sport team and tagged with various concepts, each modelled according to the Sport ontology. This is a critical piece of our semantic DNA, explaining to other machines, as well as librarians and other data curators, how to understand and interpret the Sport domain. Competitors' names aren't just labels in an unintelligent system; they are athletes competing in medal-winning events, as part of wider disciplines. All these specific relationships help to organise BBC content and make it easier for other parts of the BBC, and external partners, to work with our content.

It also represents a big step forward for our editorial team, who can now add stories to dozens of pages on the Sport site in one quick process, instead of having to add them manually to indexes and remember to maintain those pages. That manual process would never have scaled to allow us to manage the thousands of athlete pages that will arrive on the Olympics site in the future.

Coming Soon

Here's a quick list of some of the features that are almost ready to meet the audience.

• Comprehensive event schedule: With more than 300 medal-winning events taking place this summer, it's important to allow our users to zoom in on the schedule of activities that mean the most to them. We've launched the full event schedule pages already, but will be adding more detail to the event pages themselves very soon.  
• Homepage improvements: The new Sport Olympics landing page will be adding a few bespoke features, such as profiles for the key Team GB contenders, and a countdown to the Games. 
• Venue guides: Expect to see areas of the site where you can find out much more about the locations hosting the Games, and what's going on at each. 
• Follow-an-athlete/event/country: We'll be making it easier for people to get alerted to the latest news from their favourite people and sports by making it possible for people to personalise a page of things which interest them. 

Andrew Pipes is Senior Product Manager, Sport & Olympics 2012, BBC Future Media