Promethean Puts Personalised Learning Back On The Agenda

Coursepack

Created for the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s
IN 2010 Conference
September 21‐23, 2010

By Outsell, Inc.
www.outsellinc.com

Outsell is the only research and advisory firm focused on advancing
the publishing and information industries. Our international team
provides independent, fact‐based analysis and actionable advice
about competitors, markets, operational benchmarks, and best
practices, so our clients thrive and grow in today's fast‐changing
digital and global environment.

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Education market, contact Tom Walsh at twalsh@outsellinc.com

© 2010 Outsell, Inc. Reproduction strictly prohibited.

Promethean Puts Personalised Learning Back On The Agenda
By Kate Worlock, September 2, 2010
Promethean, a developer of whiteboards and other interactive classroom technologies, has gone back
to well‐established educational principles to develop a personalised real‐time interactive system for use
in classrooms.
Important Details: Promethean, which is headquartered in the UK but which delivers technology
solutions to 500,000 K‐12 classrooms in 100 countries around the world, has been working on a
solution to a common complaint. The limitations of student response systems (individual clickers
used by students to answer questions in a whole class scenario) have traditionally included an
inability to allow students to proceed at their own pace, and a lag time which can damage the pace
of the lesson.

Promethean’s new software is based on what it calls “real‐time personalised intervention”, or RTPI.
This means that each student is sent a question direct to their Promethean ActivExpression clicker
device and immediately gets a new question once that has been answered, rather than having to
wait for the rest of the class. Furthermore, the system includes an adaptive learning element so that
each student can proceed at their own pace. The teacher can visually track the whole class’s
progress through a laptop, where questions are colour‐coded by difficulty and incorrect responses
indicated with a red X.

Earlier this year Promethean formed an alliance with CTB‐McGraw‐Hill, the assessment division of
McGraw‐Hill Education (see Insights 28 April 2010, CTB/McGraw‐Hill Launches Community for
Acuity Customers), linking Promethean’s ActivExpression clickers to CTB’s Acuity Unwired
InFormative Assessment solution. Acuity UnWired instantly displays student responses and percent
correct scores, and uploads student performance data to Acuity for creating reports in the future.

Implications: The theory behind this approach is not new. It was previously called “drill and
practice”, and is effective because students receive immediate feedback and can quickly move on to
other problems, which is highly motivational for learners. Undertaking this in a classroom
environment also introduces a competitive element to the process.

However, even as developments like this are launched, some educators have yet to be convinced of
the benefits of any digital learning solutions. Educators and even some students have complained
that using technology in the classroom is a distraction ‐ one of the benefits of the Kindle in an
educational setting was that students could do nothing with it but read, so they were not tempted
into checking e‐mail or Tweeting (see Thinking Out Loud Education blog post 20 April 2010, Kindle
Unsuitable As A TextBook Replacement ‐ Few Surprises Here Then). Good teaching is in many ways
an art rather than a science, where building a relationship between educator and student is vital.
Where technology can aid that process and provide motivation to learn, then real benefits will arise;
however, where technology serves to distract and deter then problems will occur which will
continue to hold back the development of the digital education environment.


Digital Textbooks Underwhelm In Higher Education…So Far
By Kate Worlock, August 25, 2010
Back to school fever does not yet seem to be sending users stampeding to buy digital textbooks in
favour of their print counterparts.
Important Details: As the Back to School season approaches, and amidst much hype around the
burgeoning success of consumer fiction e‐books, publishers and textbook retailers are doing their
best to highlight their digital textbook offerings to students with money to burn. Examples of these
activities include CourseSmart’s promotion of its iPhone and iPad apps, Barnes & Noble’s launch of
the NOOKstudy platform (see Insights 16 July 2010, E‐Textbooks: Back In The News Again), and
new products from companies like Inkling, a start‐up that has worked with McGraw‐Hill to launch
four digital textbook titles which are specifically designed to take advantage of the capabilities of
the iPad. Inkling is also said to have deals in place with John Wiley and Cengage Learning.

Usage of e‐books in higher education has so far however remained low, for a variety of reasons (see
Outsell’s May 2010 report, The Future of the Textbook Marketplace). A recently released June 2010
survey of further and higher education institutions in the UK, undertaken by Eduserv, found that
most respondents (67%) indicated that less than 10% of the course modules at their institutions
recommended or mandated the use of an e‐textbook. Indeed, almost 14% said that no courses
recommended the use of e‐textbooks. In the main, institutional budgets for e‐book purchases were
held by the library, and drivers of purchasing included the need to serve distance learners, demand
from students, cost savings, shelf space issues and demand from faculty. However, predicting how
spending on e‐textbooks might increase was very difficult, with more than half of respondents
answering “don’t know” to this question, although 20% saw budget increasing by more than 50%
over the next two years. In more than 50% of cases, any increase in spending on e‐textbooks is likely
to a similar level of reduction in spending on their print counterparts.  Often, spending on e‐books
had been done at the end of the academic year, when leftover budget could be safely used for more
experimental purchases.

Implications: Print products in these markets still have strong legs, and unless a sudden and
unforeseen transformation in teaching practices is seen, this is likely to remain so for some time to
come. E‐readers have not yet been able to prove that they can fulfil the range of demands apparent
from both students and faculty, as indicated by the Amazon Kindle trials, and a mixed marketplace
economy where faculty, students and information providers can work together to learn how digital
media can best support the learning process seems the most likely future outcome.

A range of factors (such as falling prices of devices and content, and an increasingly wide range of
content availability) in the consumer marketplace have kick‐started the e‐books revolution there,
but these factors will not be enough in the higher education marketplace. Education demands a
product which is not only cheaper (and the upfront costs of devices such as the iPad mean that this
criteria has not yet been fulfilled) but also delivers a better learning experience. Problems with
slowness of page‐turning, and the inability to use e‐reader devices to do anything other than read,
plus the challenges around integrating content with back end systems such as learning
management systems, mean that there is still a long way to go before we start to approach a mass
market scenario.


Nixty Launches With Lofty Visions
By Kate Worlock, August 11, 2010
Making open educational resources easy to find and re‐use should be a strong selling point for this new
start‐up.
Important Details: Nixty, which launched on 13 July, has grand plans. It claims to be
“revolutionising education”, and “empowering education for everyone”. The site provides services
for a range of different user types. For college‐level institutions and educators, Nixty offers the
ability to create online courses using open educational resources, and to use course management
tools such as grade books, discussion boards and testing environments. It’s therefore essentially an
online Learning Management System (LMS) as well as a place to locate or create online courses. For
students, Nixty already offers more than 200 free courses from well regarded sources such as the
Khan Academy and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare project. Future Nixty
plans include developing the offering to suit K‐12 and professional development audiences as well
as the college market.

Pricing for the service is low. Students can access all of the current courses free of charge, while
paid‐for courses will become available once they have been prepared and launched by Nixty’s
educator members. Costs for educators are low: public courses, which are free for students to take,
are also free to create, and Nixty will charge teachers creating paid‐for courses $4.99 per month for
three courses, or $9.99 per month for nine courses. In addition, Nixty will take a 20% commission
fee. This payment system will roll out in the next month.

Like many other social networking applications Nixty uses a reputation system, enabling users to
“vote up” or “vote down” content, giving the providers of that content “karma points” when it is
voted up. All users automatically get an ePortfolio which lists the courses taken and information
about the individual including details of their karma points and comments they’ve made on the
site’s resources.

In addition to these features, Nixty is also rolling out what it calls “WikiCourses”. Anyone can add
lessons to these courses, amend existing lessons, or change the sequence of the lessons.

Implications: Nixty hopes, of course, that the simplicity and usability of its interface will make it the
go‐to place for colleges to cheaply and easily set up and run online courses. The company has a
strong global vision as well, and understands that offering free courses could attract a large global
audience reasonably quickly, with the potential for helping institutions around the world serve
international students at a price point they can afford. It’s certainly a more cost effective option
than setting up a local campus ‐ Michigan State University recently closed its Dubai campus, citing
lower than hoped for student numbers.

Perhaps the key difference between Nixty and other online course aggregators such as iTunes U
and YouTube EDU is that it enables communication between the student and the instructor as well
as amongst the students ‐ this brings the Nixty experience closer to that of a traditional student,
rather than a learner who works through these materials without support.

As yet there is no mention of linking to paid‐for content like digital textbooks, but if instructors are
going to use a system of this sort then this is a likely next step. Until then, Nixty is providing a
valuable case study to see what the level of take‐up and interest might be amongst students,
educators and institutions, and to learn more about how courses are created, sold and used. Nixty
has built it ‐ now will the users come?


E‐Textbooks: Back In The News Again
By Kate Worlock, July 16, 2010
With a flurry of announcements, the digital textbook game has been moved up a notch.
Important Details: The first announcement came on 12 July from CourseSmart, which unveiled its
Faculty Instant Access Program, a solution which enables faculty access to a library of digital
content through their institution’s Learning Management System (LMS) or Campus Portal. LMS
which are supported by the system include Moodle, Sakai, Desire2Learn and Blackboard, while
compatible Campus Portals include SunGard Luminis, Datatel Portal and uPortal. CourseSmart
claims that it can provide access to more than 90% of the most popular textbooks, and its system
has long been used by faculty as a one‐stop shop for identifying and then assessing new textbooks.
Initially CourseSmart is rolling the implementation out in 10 institutions; it aims to deliver a
customised, flexible and lightweight program which will serve the needs of faculty who already use
CourseSmart in their workflow, and make it even easier to do this. For example, many faculty
already use the service for textbook evaluation, and some use it in classroom situations to show a
sample problem or a graphic from the course textbook. CourseSmart’s aim is to make this even
easier, increase the instances of use, and thereby accelerate the acceptance of digital course
materials, with the attendant benefits which this acceptance will bring.

Blackboard was also on the case, with a raft of announcements at its annual BbWorld event which
included partnerships with two major college bookstore players, Barnes & Noble (B&N) and Follett,
and a key higher educational publisher, McGraw‐Hill. The McGraw‐Hill deal brings Blackboard’s
web‐based teaching and learning platform Blackboard Learn into close harmony with McGraw‐Hill’s
Connect platform as well as with its custom publishing systems. The integration, the first of its kind
between Blackboard and a major publisher, will allow students and faculty to use their Blackboard
login to access the full suite of McGraw‐Hill Connect content and tools. Additionally, scores for
McGraw‐Hill Connect assignments, quizzes and tests will post directly to the Blackboard
gradebook.

The deal with Follett gives students the ability to purchase and use digital textbooks directly in
Blackboard Learn, and streamlines the way that instructors assign texts and the ease with which
students can access and use them. It also provides access to Follett’s CafeScribe, an e‐textbook and
social networking platform that gives students and instructors the ability to read, highlight,
annotate, share notes, and form campus and worldwide study groups. The B&N deal is similar, also
allowing students to purchase books directly in Blackboard Learn, as well as connecting with B&N’s
newly launched NOOKstudy platform.

NOOKstudy will be available from August, and provides a downloadable application for PC and Mac
which B&N hopes will act as a central localised starting point for students. Not only can they access
paid‐for and free digital textbook content from the Nook e‐book store, Nookstudy can also be used
to organise textbooks, lecture notes, handouts and other course information. The platform is also
an e‐book reader for books purchased from B&N, with the ability to open multiple textbooks
simultaneously, highlight text, zoom, searc, and take notes. Notably, no NOOK e‐reader device is
needed to use NOOKstudy.

Implications: These announcements are the first indicators of what students starting or going back
to college in Fall 2010 can come to expect. The integrations of systems is a very welcome sign that
accessing digital textbook content may soon be as easy for students as finding the material in print ‐
this is a significant psychological boundary to cross. If digital services can provide demonstrable
value over and above print then we should see a tipping point come sooner rather than later (see 3
May 2010 Market Report, The Future of the Textbook Market).


However, there remains a weary sense in some of these services that duplication of the print
offering is still something to boast about. The NOOKstudy platform, for example, allows students
to make notes in their e‐textbooks and highlight sections ‐ revolutionary! And the system will open
a book where the student left off ‐ unbelievable! Unless you’ve heard of an inexpensive device called
a bookmark.

The real excitement here lies in the connection of the backend systems which will make using
digital textbooks a given. Connecting with an LMS provider like Blackboard provides a win‐win
situation for all parties ‐ Blackboard further consolidates its position in the LMS market, while
McGraw‐Hill boost usage of Connect, and Follett and B&N serve customers through a new channel.
For CourseSmart, the benefits will lie in what happens as digital course material increasingly
becomes the norm. This plays directly to the rule “take the service to the customers” ‐ if Blackboard
is where the students and faculty are already located, then building a bridge to those customers
makes perfect sense.


Blackboard Acquires Elluminate and Wimba to General Acclamation
By Kate Worlock, July 12, 2010
As research indicates the benefits of online learning, Blackboard opens itself up to collaboration and
integration with other technology systems.
Important Details:  Elluminate and Wimba provide virtual classroom technology solutions that
enable educational institutions to run live courses online using audio, video, whiteboard and social
learning applications. Blackboard will combine the offerings of the two companies to form a new
standalone platform called Blackboard Collaborate, which will not only supplement traditional
courses, but will also help support fully online courses, and other collaborative activities such as
managing virtual office hours sessions, team meetings, professional development, student projects
and mentoring and tutoring opportunities.

Elluminate’s offerings include Live!, an electronic learning, conferencing, and online collaboration
tool with note taking features, two‐way interactive video, archiving and automatic indexing of e‐
learning sessions, organizational tools for teachers (pop‐up announcements, sorting of participants
by hand raising, timers, and other features), whiteboarding, and various other collaboration tools.
This and other products are in use in more than 1,900 higher education and K‐12 institutions in 81
countries. Wimba provides interactive collaborative technologies for K‐12 schools and post‐
secondary institutions, including the Collaboration Suite, which includes four of Wimba’s
communications tools: Classroom (a virtual classroom environment); Pronto (an instant messaging
and voice chat tool); Voice (a live audio tool); and Create (a utility for converting Word documents
to LMS‐friendly formats). These tools are used by more than 700 K‐12 and post‐secondary
institutions in 28 countries.

Implications:  The acquisitions of Elluminate and Wimba will set Blackboard back around $116
million, so while not a big deal in terms of cash outlay, this signals an important development in
Blackboard’s approach to the market. There is a perception that the learning management system
(LMS) market has become somewhat commoditised, and that Blackboard may face a struggle to
increase its market share, particularly under challenging economic conditions in which early
adopters already have systems in place. It has done so before through acquisition (notably WebCT
and ANGEL Learning ‐ see Insights 12 May 2009, Blackboard Chalks Up Another Win with Its
Acquisition of Angel Learning and Research Brief 14 October 2005, Blackboard Acquires WebCT:
Learning Management’s Big Deal), but declared a truce in its lawsuit against Desire2Learn  (see
Insights 13 March 2008, Latest Score: Blackboard 1 ‐ Desire2Learn 0. Industry Impact ‐ Limited) and
also faces competition from open source competitors such as Moodle, and from regional players
like Pearson’s Fronter, which is strong in Europe.

If you can’t increase market share in your core area, the next best thing is to identify neighbouring
growth areas, and invest there. Synchronous tools represent one of the fastest growing technology
segments in education, and arguably the one with the greatest prospects for future growth. What
Blackboard’s announcement also indicates is a movement away from viewing the LMS as the be all
and end all ‐ the key now is to be able to offer a package comprised of a range of elements all of
which synchronise together smoothly. This is vital for educational IT buyers ‐ tools which won’t
work with products which are already well established on campus won’t be successful.

So this announcement ticks a number of important boxes. It brings in tools from a fast‐growing
segment of the market and ensures that they will work seamlessly with other Blackboard offerings.
Additionally, it expands Blackboard’s reach into institutions which are offering distance learning
and blended learning models. A May 2009 US Department of Education meta‐analysis of
effectiveness studies of online, face‐to‐face, and blended learning models found that online


learning produced better student outcomes than face‐to‐face classes, and that blended learning
offered an even “larger advantage”. Improving educational outcomes is ultimately the name of the
game, and tools from Elluminate and Wimba which can help support these online and blended
learning packages are already well respected and well used in the market. These acquisitions should
do far more than a law suit in helping Blackboard take market share from Desire2Learn.


2010: the Year of the Digital Platform
By Ned May, July 5, 2010
A series of recent industry moves suggests the end of publisher attempts to create a consumer reading
device. These initiatives, so prominently announced in 2009, are now giving way to efforts around
digital platforms instead. That’s good news for all involved.
Important Details: On June 14, 2010 News Corp announced several moves to capitalize on digital
content developments. The company acquired the Skiff digital reader platform ‐ but not the actual
device ‐ from the Hearst initiative of the same name, and also announced an investment in
Journalism Online, and the appointment of Jon Housman as the president of its Digital Journalism
Initiatives.
The following day, Next Issue Media — a joint venture of News Corp, Hearst, Conde Nast, Meredith
and Time Inc that is tasked with, amongst other things, developing a digital reader platform —
announced that it had hired a new CEO to replace the interim CEO John Squires who came to the
venture directly from Time. The new CEO, Morgan Guenther, brings an outside‐of‐publishing
background but one that centers around digital media and disruptive devices, including two years as
the president of TiVo.
Then, on June 29, LibreDigital acquired the e‐commerce platform Symtio from Harper Collins. The
technology is described as “a multi‐channel digital media platform that enables customers to
purchase and access digital media ‐ including eBooks, audiobooks, music, and video ‐ online or
through an in‐store retail card program.” Said another way, it is an all inclusive digital media
storefront that is agnostic to walls and containers.

Implications: These announcements signal the end of those short lived efforts by many publishers
to build a physical e‐reader device. The Skiff announcement says as much about Hearst as it does
about News Corp. First, publishers should not be in the business of manufacturing (or sourcing)
devices any more than they should be in the business of building printing presses. That’s not to say
that, at the time, the investments by Hearst and others were not warranted nor wise. They were
both made as Amazon’s Kindle was emerging as a dominant platform (see Insights 17 September
2007, Amazon’s Kindle Device Re‐Ignites e‐book Interest), tipping the balance of power away from
the content producers and toward that retailer instead. But with more competition in the device
marketplace, not the least of which is Apple’s iPad, Amazon’s power has diminished (see Insights 10
September 2008, iPod? Check. Laptop? Check. Kindle? Not So Fast) and the point of competition,
and thus investment, has now re‐focused around the underlying platforms.

Initial speculation around the News Corp announcement was that it might indicate a lack of
commitment by them in the Next Issue Media joint venture, given its outright purchase of the
competing platform from Skiff. But seen in the context of this LibreDigital announcement, the
appointment of Guenther to head Next Issue seems as important and strategic as any of the
announcements. LibreDigital is putting in place the pieces necessary to sell any media in any locale ‐
be it an online storefront, a big box retailer, or a coffee shop. News Corp is merely hedging its
digital initiative bets, given the persistent lack of visibility into future landscape of devices,
platforms, and business models.

How unclear is this future? The LibreDigital announcement and Next Issue Media’s appointment of
Guenther to head a digital content initiative point to how truly meaningless yesterday’s media
containers may become. Pick up an iPad and you have the option to watch a TV show, a movie, or
even a live sports event. You also have the option to read news, a magazine or a book ‐ with or
without videos ‐ and you can listen to countless audio feeds ‐ from a live stream from around the
world to an archived item from years ago. Finally, you can also play thousands of games, from


digital versions of childhood classics to entirely new ones that incorporate the tactile advantages of
the newest digital devices. That breadth of choice means content producers will need to either
make their content so compelling that at times it trumps the other experiences available or they will
need to make their content so devoid of boundaries that it can be delivered as an element of any
other experience outlined above.

The smart money is currently doing both ‐ building out proprietary delivery platforms while also
engaging in efforts of cross media and cross company collaboration. We advise all participants in
the industry to do the same.


iPads, Xboxes, and Coffee Shops All Begin to Compete
By Ned May, June 16, 2010
New devices and delivery channels are enabling consumers to obtain content in a myriad of new ways.
As competition heats up around control the end user, content owners may need to rethink where and
how they play.
Important Details: On Monday June 14th, Microsoft announced a deal with ESPN that will provide
the sports network’s content over the Xbox gaming platform. The same day, Starbucks announced
that it will be providing free unlimited WiFi access within all of its company‐owned stores in the US,
and in partnership with Yahoo! it will bundle in free ‘one click’ access over this network to paid
content from a range of providers such as the Wall Street Journal. These announcements were on
the heels of reports highlighting data that indicated global web traffic had hit an all time peak over
the weekend due to immense interest in the opening games of the World Cup. Only two weeks
before all this, Apple had revealed it had sold over two million iPads in less than 60 days.

Implications: What do all these seemingly disparate announcements tell us about the world of
publishing? Starting with the last one first, the evidence seems to suggest that the hype around the
iPad was justified. With its initial sales trajectory far surpassing other Apple product launches,
including the iPod and iPhone, one need not work too hard to extrapolate the implications for the
ultimate adoption rates of this device. In simplest terms there is a new form of container that has
now entered our lexicon. Fortunately for publishers, user experiences on this new container share
some familiarity with old forms, which is one reason publishers are putting so much attention to the
iPad today. The implications of this new device are fairly understandable even if some new thinking
needs to be applied.

However, with the ever more complex ways with which we all interact with content and with each
other, context is increasingly king. Therefore it is important to look at the opportunity for content
providers on the iPad in the context of an individual user’s overall time. Doing so leads us to the
reason we have gathered such a diverse group of announcements in the important details section
above ‐ each speaks to the growing competition for an end user’s free time as collectively they
highlight the breadth of devices capable of displaying all types of different media today.

As an example, an iPhone streaming live soccer over a cellular network can trump the user
experience of a 60″ television hardwired to a cable line if the game is being played while the viewer
is riding a train to work. Said another way, form may matter when all else is equal but rarely today is
such a level playing field found ‐ especially now that new devices and delivery channels allow
anyone to consume content on their own terms regardless of whether that content is classified as
an interactive game, a news story, a movie, or increasingly some hybrid product not easily tagged.

As a result, we are seeing efforts emerge to rationalize these experiences such as IEEE’s attempt to
create a standard for enabling end user control over content ownership rights. Fortunately for
content creators, the perceived need for such a standard also reflects the challenges around
realizing the dream of ubiquitous content consumption today. With all the divergent devices,
channels, and business relationships, more often than not if a user wants to consume content across
different devices the easiest, if not the only, way to do so is to pay for the same content again. That
may be great news for content owners in the short term as the novelty of new experiences is
generating additional revenue, but it is not a sustainable trend. Wired magazine may have sold over
100,000 copies of its first digital edition at $4.99, but the telling data will be the level of single issues
sales a year from now.


In the interim, all content creators are advised to look for new ways to sell and distribute their
content across all these platforms as they emerge. For example, what opportunities may exist
within multiplayer games or on smartphones to supplement a sport event in between games? Yes
the iPad seems all but certain to take its place in this continuum of media devices but it will be only
one spot of many. There is a battle brewing over what will be tomorrow’s dominant platforms and
who will ultimately control access to end users across each. For all but the very largest of publishers,
that battle is likely out of reach and their efforts are better served by making sure their content is
enabled and ready for distribution in the broadest of ways.


Pearson MyLabs: Serving Students and Educators
By Kate Worlock, June 2, 2010
Pearson’s well‐established MyLabs series of products now serve 54 different subject disciplines and,
unusually, have aspects which serve both students and their teachers.
Important Details: Pearson’s MyLabs series of text‐specific online products accompanies Pearson
Education textbooks for a variety of courses including mathematics, developmental psychology,
social work, history, sociology, Spanish and biology. Each MyLabs product provides a set of course
materials to accompany the textbook, along with course‐management tools (powered by
CourseCompass) so that educators can customize their online courses. Pearson provides students
with pre‐paid access when they purchase a new, participating textbook.  Take‐up is high, with
Pearson having issued six million online access codes in 2009 alone.
MyLabs is a tutorial and assessment product designed to help students when they need it. First
launched for mathematics, MyLabs products are now available for 54 subjects and are sold globally.
The original MyMathLab has been translated into Latin American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese,
and more local language translations for other subjects are in the pipeline. The products contain a
great deal of targeted practice material within a study plan, so that students can take their own
assessment which provides them with feedback and pointers to additional work which can be done
before a re‐test is taken. Educators can use MyLabs to set homework (either using pre‐set
questions, or their own) and track student progress.

MyLab is sold in much the same manner as traditional textbooks, with lecturers in both the US and
the UK adopting or recommending the product to their students. Students make up the bulk of the
market, but the product is also sometimes bought by institutions on behalf of their students ‐ this is
becoming increasingly popular at US for‐profit colleges. In the US more purchasing is taking place
at the institutional level than in the UK, where purchasing by institutions tends to be done at
departmental level.

Implications: Essentially, MyLabs delivers the same content that the textbook has always offered,
with the added benefit of an increased amount of audio and video supplementary material, and the
ability for the student to identify where they need more support, and for the system to be able to
deliver that targeted help.  Like McGraw‐Hill’s Connect product (see Insights 26 May 2010, McGraw‐
Hill’s LearnSmart Delivers Adaptive Learning), MyLabs was developed because of the perceived
need to help improve education for students in the face of rapidly increasing class sizes, particularly
in the US market.

Case studies available through the MyMathLab web site help to demonstrate the ways in which
faculty are using the product to improve learning outcomes. For example, DeVry University
implemented MyMathLab in the summer of 2005, and reported that in the trimester immediately
preceding the implementation, the percentage of students achieving A/B grades (i.e. scoring over
80% on exams) was 39%. By the summer of 2007 the percentage of on‐site, full‐campus students
achieving A/B grades increased to 68.4%; overall A/B rates were 65.%.

Finding solid evidence of performance improvement remains rare, and Pearson’s case studies show
not only how results have been affected, but also how many ways there are to implement the same
product. Pearson’s next steps are to continue the extension into other languages, and also to
integrate the products more closely with other Pearson services such as eCollege, bringing the
MyLabs learning platform together with student information systems. Pearson’s range of service
offerings, if they are integrated well, will make the MyLabs product set increasingly difficult to
compete with.



McGraw‐Hill’s LearnSmart Delivers Adaptive Learning
By Kate Worlock, May 26, 2010
McGraw‐Hill’s range of higher education products delivers a range of possible solutions, including
customisation options for professors and adaptive solutions for students.
Important Details: Amidst McGraw‐Hill’s range of print and digital solutions for higher education
sit two products which provide a valuable indication of how products in this area are developing and
being built to complement one another. The first is Connect, an online learning assessment and
assignment solution launched in September 2009 which now covers more than 100 different course
areas.  Connect is intended to solve a major instructor pain point, namely the time it takes to
manually mark and grade homework assignments. As student numbers have increased over the last
few years, faculty members have found it increasingly difficult to grade all the homework they
wanted to assign.  Evidence from McGraw‐Hill’s extensive faculty interviews suggested that many
instructors actually graded only about one third of the homework that they assigned.

Connect enables educators to set up a course and plot out a syllabus within modules that include
readings, homework problems, practice quizzes, and self‐paced learning plans. The instructor can
configure the system to provide students with hints and help while they are working, and it
automatically grades the work upon submission. The assignment engine allows for a wide variety of
problem types including multiple choice questions, dynamically‐generated algorithmic problems,
accounting and finance worksheets, graphing problems, matching and labelling exercises, and
interactive video scenarios as well as instructor‐created content. Instructors using Connect say that
the system enables students to the work more efficiently and gives them a window into each
student’s work performance (through the reporting tools) that they have never had before. This
enables them to better work with each student individually and keep a pulse on where the overall
class is in comprehending the topics. Connect can also come equipped with an integrated eBook in
the form of Connect Plus so that the student does not need to purchase a printed edition. In
Connect Plus, the student can either read the eBook normally or toggle back and forth while they
are doing their homework. The problems are linked to the specific sections of the book covering the
topic.

McGraw‐Hill is continuing to develop Connect and extend it to other subjects; it is also being
positioned as a major platform for launching other products. However, Connect is not adaptive, has
no built‐in artificial intelligence, and no built‐in pedagogy. This is where LearnSmart comes into
play. Designed for students to use on a self‐paced basis, LearnSmart assesses the student’s
knowledge of a topic on an ongoing basis and adapts the questioning approach until the student
becomes proficient in the subject. The system constantly tracks both the student’s knowledge and
their confidence level in their knowledge. Using these two factors, the system guides them along
the learning path specific to their individual needs. LearnSmart also has powerful reporting tools
that give the instructor a window into individual student performance as well as the overall class.
The system is based on research into learning theory that prescribes linkages between topics and
uses a taxonomy to map proficiency from simple recall to deeper comprehension, application, and
analysis. LearnSmart has been sold as a standalone product for direct student purchase and is
currently being incorporated into the Connect platform so that students have access to all the
course resources in one place.

Implications: For so many digital education products, including WileyPlus, CengageCourse and
McGraw‐Hill’s Connect and LearnSmart, the concept of the textbook remains a central tenet
because it is so reassuring and familiar to the user base, and this familiarity is still vital to making a
sale. At this stage of market development, most digital products are still sold bundled with a print
textbook. This comes down largely to the measured pace of change in teaching practice. Teachers


and learning institutions are confronted with a myriad of evolving technologies and are careful to
evaluate new approaches on the basis of evidence of efficacy and practicality of implementation.
The challenge for all of these digital innovations is to actually improve the learning process while
maintaining a sustainable level of effort for the instructor and institution. The textbook has evolved
over many years of deep engagement with the market place and still reflects the generally agreed
upon organising construct for a given course. Digital technology offers a potentially much deeper
interaction between student and content with the ability to analyze the individual student’s
performance and provide help at the point of need. Digital will continue to replace print at the rate
that it proves to be efficacious and practical.

Building solutions which interconnect and yet which target different customer groups in the
marketplace should serve McGraw‐Hill well. The challenge will come in adapting the products so
that they suit different subjects, while still maintaining the product core. But at least these digital
solutions put a degree of control back into the hands of the publisher ‐ pirating an adaptive product
is a very different beast to simply copying PDFs of print textbooks. Also, since no used digital
market is possible, publishers can earn 100% of the revenues generated from their digital product,
rather than only making money on the first sale of a textbook and then watching others earn
revenues in the used book market.


Horizon Report Makes Its Predictions for 2010
By Kate Worlock, May 7, 2010
This year’s Horizon Report suggests that mobile delivery of educational content and services will be
a key near‐term trend to watch.
Important Details: The 2010 Horizon Report is the seventh in an annual series produced by the
New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. The report is based on the work of
the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, a qualitative research project established in 2002 that
identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning,
or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years. Each report
describes six emerging technologies or practices which are likely to enter mainstream use within
this period.

The emerging technologies or practices covered in this year’s report, and the timeframes in which
they are expected to move into the mainstream, are:

• Mobile computing (near term ‐ within the next 12 months);
• Open content (near term ‐ within the next 12 months);
• E‐books (medium term ‐ two or three years away);
• Simple augmented reality (medium term ‐ two or three years away);
• Gesture‐based computing (longer term ‐ four or five years away);
• Visual data analysis (longer term ‐ four or five years away).

Implications: Mobile computing was highlighted as a near‐term trend to watch in the 2009 Horizon
report as well. The report, which outlines a handful of the hundreds of mobile computing projects at
higher education institutions in the US, suggests that mobile devices are increasingly the platform
of choice given that they are much cheaper than desktop or laptop computers. However, what the
report does not mention is the challenge for educational service providers of developing offerings
for a very broad range of mobile devices. Little change, other than an increase in the amount of
experimentation with mobile services, seems to have taken place between the two Horizon reports,
and it seems likely that until better mobile delivery standards are available, experimentation rather
than mainstream take‐up will continue to be the name of the game.

The Horizon report remains well worth watching, since some of its previous predictions have been
very good. In the 2008 report mobile broadband was highlighted as a developing trend in the two‐
three year timeframe, and this has certainly been the case. The report has also highlighted cloud
computing in the past, and indeed the use of services like Google Docs in educational settings has
been worth noting.

In addition to the list above, Outsell would suggest that the following trends would also be worth
considering:

• Customisation: increasingly, faculty members are able to refine publishers’ offerings to suit
their own courses, and in rare cases such as Dynamic Books (see Insights 8 March 2010,
Macmillan Allows Users To Dissect The Textbook) can even amend textbooks at sentence level.
• DIY services: faculty are starting to create their own content, which is not necessarily being
made available as open educational resources, but as revenue‐generating offerings. A recent
example here includes the 20 textbooks developed at Florida State College at Jacksonville.


• Whole service offerings: While the Horizon report predicts the emergence of e‐books into the
mainstream over the next two‐three years, it seems increasingly likely that this trend may be
overtaken by the development of whole course offerings such as WileyPlus or Pearson MyLab
which go far beyond what the textbook can deliver, whether in a print or electronic format.

Contact Outsell, Inc.

Call +1 650.342.6060
Fax +1 650.342.7135
330 Primrose Road, Suite 510
Burlingame, California 94010

Call +1 617.497.9443
Fax +1 617.497.5256
763 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139

Call +44 (0)20 8090 6590
Fax +44 (0)20 7031 8101
25 Floral Street,
London, WC2E 9DS

info@outsellinc.com
www.outsellinc.com

The information, analysis, and opinions (the “Content”) contained herein are based on the
qualitative and quantitative research methods of Outsell, Inc. and its staff’s extensive professional
expertise in the industry. Outsell has used its best efforts and judgment in the compilation and
presentation of the Content and to ensure to the best of its ability that the Content is accurate as of
the date published. However, the industry information covered by this report is subject to rapid
change. Outsell makes no representations or warranties, express or implied, concerning or relating
to the accuracy of the Content in this report and Outsell assumes no liability related to claims
concerning the Content of this report.


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