Education

Don't look now, but textbook publishers are trying to become software companies. And tech startups are trying to outmaneuver these giants to win the future of educational content and tools. It's one of the big trends in edtech and digital media.

Indeed, digital publishing has "fundamentally changed every aspect of what we are doing with our content," says Michael Hansen, the CEO of Cengage Learning, an education publisher that recently moved headquarters from Connecticut to Boston, while also opening a new office in techie-rich San Francisco.

Digital textbooks continue to be one of the key frustrations in the public education arena. So far, they're not more widely available than print, they're not more cost effective than their paper counterparts, and they're still a one-size-fits-all tool that teachers are required to use without much prior input into which texts will best meet their students' needs in any given year. In short, digital textbooks have yet to live up to the hype that surrounded them as K12 teachers still don't have the advantages that digital can offer.

The days of purely teaching students through text books is something that should be found in a history book, or more likely, an online history course or app. The tried-and-true, and ancient, method of teaching through books alone has been forever changed by technology. McGraw-Hill Education has been investing a lot of time, money and research into the 21st Century classroom and is releasing new educational video games that introduce new ways for kids of all ages to learn everything from politics to Spanish.

Today at SXSWedu in Austin, McGraw-Hill Education introduced Connect Insight, a data analytics and visualization tool that provides at-a-glance views of student performance in real time via a tablet device.

Connect Insight automates the data analysis process so that instructors can pinpoint how each student is performing individually and relative to peers, as well as gauge the effectiveness of their assignments. It also acts as an early warning system to immediately identify and help struggling students.

Fast Company has profiled the most innovative companies in education and several publishers and ebook solutions providers have made the top ten list. Read who's leading the way in education here.

If you attended public school in the US, you probably have memories of working your way through the colored rainbow of those SRA reading labs and math labs, big boxes of work-at-your-own-pace laminated tabbed sheets of leveled exercises. And sure, thirty years ago, that was as innovative as the typical classroom got by acknowledging that not every student will learn at the same pace as his peers, and that not all coursework has to be structured for the whole group setting.

In 2012, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) filed for bankruptcy protection. In July of this year, Cengage Learning did the same, hoping to eliminate $4 billion in debt. Earlier in the year, McGraw-Hill completed the sale of its entire education division. And though HMH has since emerged nearly debt free and is seeking an IPO, clearly these are signs that disruptive changes are underway in educational publishing.

The advent of digital media has presented educational publishers with opportunities not only for the delivery of effective teaching and learning solutions, but also with significant challenges that are well known by readers of this column. These challenges include the need to acquire new competencies within the organizations, the creation of new partnerships with service providers and the need to sort through a range of technical issues.

Before joining Book Business last year, I was the director of graduate publishing programs at Rosemont College. In that job, it was my primary responsibility to develop courses, hire instructors and help shape the curriculum that would allow our students to gain the skills needed for a successful publishing career.

Book publishers seem to be focused more on opportunities than challenges—or perhaps it's a case of seeing ways to turn the latter into the former.