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Textbook publishers transform into ‘learning companies’

Textbook publishers like McGraw-Hill Education and Pearson are in the middle of a transformation – and it’s not just a transition to eBook-versions of their familiar products.

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Waterhouse described adaptive learning as a ‘sweet spot.’

In a recent interview with eCampus News, Lloyd “Buzz” Waterhouse, CEO of McGraw-Hill Education, predicted that by the end of this year, 38 percent of the company’s products will be digital and only one-third of its offerings will be traditional textbooks.

“That’s a pretty big migration for us from a few years ago,” Waterhouse said. “In about three years, I expect the majority of the company will be digital, and I don’t mean just eBooks. We sell a lot of them, and they’re important, but I don’t believe eBooks are the end game.”

The impact of these changes goes far wider than just a publisher’s bottom line or line of products.

While the giants of the textbook industry have previously dabbled in other educational products, recent years have seen them doing so at an unprecedented rate.

They are no longer primarily involved in just what students are reading. Pearson, for example, has partnered with schools like Howard University [2] and West Virginia University at Parkersburg [3] to provide the infrastructure for entire online degree programs.

Ellen Wagner, executive director of the WICHE Cooperative for Education Technologies, called the implications “significant.”

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 [4].

“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 [5]. 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.

“We’re moving very quickly to what we like to say is a ‘learning company,’” McGraw-Hill’s Waterhouse said in October.

In some ways, the open education movement [6] has been a reaction to these changes in the industry.

If a non-profit university feels the need to out-source course materials, why not  do it in a way that’s in-line with the more philosophically open ideals of academia?

But again, the question of quality crops up, and if the goal is to provide quality material at a cheaper price, there is already an entire industry with decades of proven experience anxious to get more involved with student outcomes.

That’s without considering the for-profit massive open online course (MOOC) platforms [7] that are also trying to push into the space.

“Business-institutional partnerships and conversations are essential if we want graduates to be ready for work when they are ready to graduate,” Wagner said. “We need to ask the question of whether it is okay for an institution to do an average job of offering an introductory course if it is possible to get an excellent version of the same course from a commercial provider for a lower cost.”

Follow Jake New on Twitter at @eCN_Jake [8].