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In recent dealmaking news, Weld North Education announces an acquisition; Follett launches a service to help K-12 libraries with genrefication; McGraw-Hill Education creates new K-12 math, science curricula; Coursera promotes new public health education courses; Rosetta Stone unveils improved iPhone app; Macmillan Publishers gets new president; German companies Stepstone, Studydrive combine; U.K. digital content purchaser Jisc Collections makes archive collections affordable.

Weld North Education to Acquire Glynlyon: Pre-K-12 digital curriculum provider Weld North Education announced it will acquire Glynlyon, Inc., another curriculum company in the marketplace, adding to its suite of educational offerings. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Glynlyon has two well-known brands: Odysseyware, which provides online learning solutions to K-12 schools in the U.S., and AOP, a homeschool curriculum. Glynlyon says it serves 1 million students in the institutional and consumer education markets and offers a self-paced, student-centered curriculum.

The transaction will expand Weld North’s portfolio of existing digital education companies, which include Edgenuity and Imagine Learning. According to Weld North, the acquisition of Glynlyon will mean increasing its student user base to 6 million.

“We are poised to grow and expand our relationships across the teaching day as we enable traditional learning to benefit our students and families,” said Jonathan Grayer, CEO of Weld North in a statement.

Last year private equity firm Silver Lake made an undisclosed investment in Weld North to help the company expand its portfolio of digital instruction products. Grayer said that the investment has helped the company grow.

“Through our partnership with Silver Lake, we have expanded and enlarged our commitment and believe that students, teachers, parents and the administrators who serve them will be better equipped to achieve their learning and educational goals by harnessing the adaptive power of digital curriculum and technology with its ability to provide continuous feedback,” Grayer said.

Follett Launches Service to Help K-12 Libraries With Genrefication: Education solutions provider Follett has announced a new service to help K-12 librarians and media specialists who are seeking to make the transition from cataloging books based on the Dewey Decimal System to organizing titles based on genres, like bookstores do.

Follett Genre Solutions offers a guide for how to execute a successful genrefication transformation, as well as do-it-yourself genre starter kits, colorful labels, improvements to its Titlewave tool that allow genres to be automatically assigned to book orders, and tips for how to maximize the available features through Follett’s Destiny Library Manager. Follett also offers genre consulting.

The new service comes after Westchester, Ill.-based Follett last year formed a Genrefication Advisory Board, comprised of 27 librarians and media specialists already using genres in their libraries, to evaluate more than a thousand genrefied libraries, according to a news release.

McGraw-Hill Education Unveils New K-12 Math, Science Curricula: New York-based education publisher McGraw-Hill has launched two new core programs for use in K-12 classrooms during the next school year, Reveal Math and Inspire Science.

Both programs are designed to actively engage students in math and science instruction.

Digital interactives such as the Web Sketchpad in Reveal Math, and Lab Simulations in Inspire Science are integrated into the content to bring concepts alive for students.

Inspire Science will be available for classroom implementation for grades K–12 beginning in fall 2019. Reveal Math, for grades 6–12, will be available for classroom implementation in fall of 2019, followed by the release of the K–5 edition. Samples of the materials and piloting options are available now, according to a news release.

Coursera Creates New Courses, Specializations for Public Health Education: Coursera, an online learning platform for higher education based in Mountain View, Calif., is featuring new health education content, which 15 top-ranked universities such as Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University and Emory University will use this year to help address the shortage of skilled workers in the healthcare  industry.

This new health education portfolio will include 100 new courses, 30 new specializations, and two public health-focused master’s degrees to prepare students for health industry jobs, especially those related to health informatics, healthcare management and public health.

The two new degrees will be a master of public health from the University of Michigan and a global master of public health from Imperial College London. The new programs started accepting applications in January, according to a news release.

Rosetta Stone Promotes New, Improved iPhone App: Rosetta Stone, an Arlington, Va.-based technology-based learning solutions company, has unveiled a new iPhone app aimed at helping to boost language learning in 30 languages.

The new app expands Rosetta Stone’s immersion-based learning method to simulate a real-life immersive experience by surrounding the learner with new words, phrases and voices of native speakers.

Rosetta Stone says it is the first language learning app to use object recognition technology to help users obtain new vocabulary, grammar, and speaking skills with objects in their everyday lives. The app is available from iTunes for $7 per month.

Macmillan Publishers Gets New President: Macmillan Publishers has announced that Maya Mavjee will be joining the company March 1 as president of publishing strategy, reporting to John Sargent, company CEO.

“Maya brings a wealth of experience to this new role and will have a broad mandate,” Sargent said in a statement.

Mavjee will acquire books to be published across Macmillan’s publishing houses, and will also assume responsibility for the Central Digital Marketing and communications groups and the company’s diversity and inclusion efforts. Before joining Macmillan, Mavjee served as president and publisher of the Crown Publishing Group at Penguin Random House from 2010 to 2018.

New York-based Macmillan is a global trade book publishing company.

German Companies Combine: Berlin-based recruitment company StepStone has announced that it will take over Cologne-based e-learning platform Studydrive and has plans to grow the service internationally with the United Kingdom and France as next steps. The amount of the deal has not been disclosed.

Studydrive, a free service for students, allows more than 700,000 students from 100 universities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland to share learning materials and lecture notes, and helps them find jobs and internships once they’ve graduated.

Stepstone offers specialized recruitment services in the U.S. via The Network, a site featuring job sites that link to more than 130 countries around the world.

U.K. Digital Content Purchaser Makes Archive Collections Affordable: Jisc Collections, the negotiation and licensing service that supports the procurement of digital content for higher education in the U.K., will make permanent a program that works with nine publishers to make digital archive collections affordable to libraries.

Libraries can choose from 110 primary source digital archival collections across the nine publishers including Brill, the British Online Archives, De Gruyter, EBSCO, Irish Newspaper Archives, ProQuest, Public Information Online, Taylor & Francis and Wiley.

The more products purchased, the lower the price for those participating. This deal is available to all U.K. publicly-funded higher education providers and further education institutions and research councils.

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Correction: The original version of this post provided an incomplete description of education company Follett.