Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Pearson Adds Schoolnet Its Platform Offer


Pearson, has acquired US digital education service Schoolnet for $230 million.

Schoolnet was founded in 1998 and helps teachers in student assessment and teaching in schools serving K12 students. It is a data-driven education database that matches individual student needs to the appropriate content and uses social networking, user-generated ratings/rankings, tagging, user-generated content to achieve this. The deal is subject to regulatory approval and will dovetail with Pearson’s existing digital learning products, such as PowerSchool and AIMSweb and offer schools a significant digital platform to support schools, teachers, parents and students.

Whereever you look you find the publishing education sector is dominated by a handful of companies and it is often no longer good enough to provide just the textbook. Like others, Pearson has long recognised this and are now building a significant business platform to support their educational offer to schools, which is not only relevant in the US, but globally and has moved them from a schools content business, to a full digital education service provider. It effectively is creating a compelling platform offer to meet all the educational needs through a one stop shop and the approach is very relevant given that the content itself is often commoditised by curriculum demands by the various educational authorities.

No comments: