McGraw-Hill Companies

Indiana appears ready to ditch the company that creates ISTEP after years of testing problems, but the cost of delivering Indiana's state tests could go way up if it does.

British-owned Pearson, another giant testing company, won the state's bid for a $38 million two-year contract to give the ISTEP test starting next spring over CTB-McGraw Hill, according to awards released today by the Indiana Department of Administration. California-based CTB-McGraw Hill has created ISTEP since the test's inception in 2009. The company had a four-year, $95 million contract to create ISTEP that expired last year.

For the fourth consecutive year, a highly regarded studies just released from BISG tracks and analyzes the key trends in how students and faculty members acquire, assign, teach, and consume educational content in multiple media formats. Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education, Volume 4, is now available as a digital report alongside a complementary study, Faculty Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education Volume 3.

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.

Roughly $5.5 billion of the over $8 billion higher education textbook market is caught in the secondary market. This is lost revenue that would otherwise be invested into the development of valuable new learning technologies

New and expanded offices will see arrival of around 140 new hires from hotbeds of technology and innovation; Company's ed-tech investments continue
McGraw-Hill Education today announced that it is expanding its Boston office to accommodate the company's growth and increasing employee headcount in digital research and development. The company also announced the opening of a new office in Seattle to serve as a hub for enhancing educational technologies for the K-12,

June 24, 2014 - As Aptara celebrates its 25th year as an award-winning digital innovator in the publishing and training industries, it announced that it has expanded its offerings to provide complete, end-to-end solutions for information providers and all businesses involved in content production.

McGraw-Hill Professional, a leading global publisher of education and professional content, today announced a partnership with Follett to further expand availability of its eBook collection to K-12 school library customers globally.

Mary Rhodes' experience serving publishers has given her an outsider's view of the inside of the publishing industry's ongoing realignment. Rhodes sees an industry rich with tradition being forced to evolve and reinvent outdated ways of doing business. Here she shares her thoughts on what publishers must do in order to thrive today.

The preliminary program and speaker roster for the upcoming IDPF conference at BEA is now available at idpf.org/db14/. IDPF Digital Book 2014, the professional digital conference at Book Expo America, is May 28-29, 2014 at the Javits Center in New York City.

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.