Post-secondary institutions have long-outsourced amenities like food, laundry, and even eMail, Wagner said, but outsourcing critical curriculum development, assessment, and management services is fairly uncharted territory.
At the same time, she said, textbook publishers have been “dancing around this very complex issue” for some time.
“It begs the question about who is driving the institutional quality conversation,” Wagner said. “About who is in charge of the academic mission of an institution.”
In just the past three years, Pearson has spent more than $1-billion on education companies that are unrelated to textbooks. Another textbook publisher, Wiley, has spent hundreds of millions.
Many of these large publishers don’t release the exact amounts they spend on investing in and acquiring other companies, but in recent years they have all spent substantial money on technology dealing with lecture capture, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, data management, assessment, placement, gaming, learning management systems, and adaptive learning.
“Adaptive is kind of our sweet spot right now,” Waterhouse said.
Some of these companies, particularly McGraw-Hill and Pearson, have making a re-branding effort of sorts. In interviews, executives are quick to point out that their companies are not textbook publishers.
“People still view us as a textbook company, but we’re actually a learning company,” said David Daniels, president of integrated solutions at Pearson, in September.
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