Education
NEW YORK ( TheStreet) -- Barnes and Noble Education (BNED) rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange after officially spinning-off from its parent company, Barnes and Noble (BKS - Get Report). Executive chairman, Michael Huseby spoke with TheStreet about what will change now that the education division is a publically traded company. Formerly the Barnes…
The Department of Education will approve a $30M contract with Amazon to create an ebook marketplace for NYC’s 1,800 public schools.
Single-sourcing eliminates the redundancy, cost, and inconsistency for creating print and ebook editions, but it’s underutilized.
This year's BookExpo America Startup Challenge winner was a bit of a dark horse, at least according to its co-founder, president and CEO Kent A. Fuka. "I was concerned about our chances because we're primarily in the education sector and BookExpo isn't really an education-focused conference." There was no need to worry, as Querium -- an adaptive learning software that takes users step by step through math and science problems -- took home the top prize of $10,000 and a free exhibit space at BEA 2016 in Chicago.
Depending on your point of view, digital technology has either undermined or enabled the book publishing industry. Either way, there's no denying that digital technology has changed publishing. Change is constant, inevitable, and often irreversible. So it goes.
Bethlam Forsa was born and raised in Addis, Ethiopia, where she says education can make a life-altering difference. Based on her upbringing, Forsa was determined to devote her life and expertise to a mission that shapes people's everyday lives. As president of Pearson's learning services, she's answering that call. Through the development of innovative learning technologies, Forsa aims to further the capacity she fervently believes education has to cause positive change in the world.
Pearson has become the latest blue-chip company to increase its venture investments, committing $50m to education start-ups in Africa and Asia. The world's largest education company by revenues, which owns the Financial Times, is expanding a fund it set up in 2012 with $15m to invest in companies focused on improving low-cost private education.
Many media and telecoms groups, including Sky, the pay-television company, and publisher Reed Elsevier, are opting for venture investments in an attempt to increase innovation and growth. Bertelsmann, the family-owned German media group, has committed at least $100m to education start-ups.
Popular blogger Audrey Watters says she is "furious and curious" about the state of ed tech. That energy is on full display in The Monsters of Education Technology, a self-published collection of talks and addresses the Hack Education founder gave during 2014.
I caught up with Watters this week via phone to talk about the often-biting views encapsulated in Monsters. Our discussion focused on six quotes from the book, which are in bold type below. The transcript of our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
As a publication, our goal not is to trend hop, but rather capture and report on the ideas at the heart of a new trend and advance the conversations around these new ideas. We want to compel our readers and ourselves to continually alter the lens through which we see the book industry. As John Morse, president and publisher at Merriam-Webster, notes in his essay, it's not enough to follow trends and do what's been proven successful. Publishers also need to strike out from the tried and true and be willing to take risks. We are excited about the future of publishing, and we hope these essays invigorate you with new and illuminating perspectives on that future.
Today, MetaMetrics®, developer of the widely adopted Lexile® Framework for Reading, announced that HarperCollins Publishers, Penguin Young Readers (a U.S. division of Penguin Random House) and Random House Children's Books (a U.S. division of Penguin Random House) will be providing Lexile® measures for many of their titles. With MetaMetrics' existing text measurement agreements with Simon & Schuster and Macmillan Publishers, MetaMetrics has now secured text measurement agreements with four out of five of the major trade book publishing companies in the United States.