Big Districts Pressure Publishers on Digital-Content Delivery

A handful of large school districts are aggressively pushing big publishers and other providers of digital content to overhaul the way they deliver instructional materials, a movement that experts say could upend long-established purchasing patterns and help educators more easily access materials from multiple vendors. The movement is being led by the 215,000-student district here and the 187,000-student Orange County, Fla., schools, which have declared they will no longer do business with content vendors that do not adopt "interoperability standards" put forth by the IMS Global Learning Consortium, a Lake Mary, Fla.-based nonprofit membership organization.