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Hitting Reset, Knewton Tries New Strategy: Competing With Textbook Publishers

Edsurge

Knewton drew heaps of hype and investment by promising to provide artificial-intelligence technology to major textbook companies to make their content more adaptive. The secret to its swift entry into publishing was OER (open education resources). On its website, Knewton describes its new online textbooks as “ course products.”

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Pearson, an Investor in Knewton, Is ‘Phasing Out’ Partnership on Adaptive Products

Edsurge

Throughout the past decade, Knewton ’s adaptive learning technology has been backed by some of the biggest names in the both the publishing and venture capital community. Pearson will no longer use Knewton’s adaptive learning engine for some of its digital offerings.

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Wiley to Acquire Knewton’s Assets, Marking an End to an Expensive Startup Journey

Edsurge

In the second eye-raising deal for the higher-ed publishing industry in as many weeks, Wiley, a major textbook publisher, has agreed to acquire the assets of Knewton, a provider of digital courseware and adaptive-learning technologies. No industry analyst we spoke with believes the sale price was anywhere near what Knewton had raised.

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Knewton’s New Business Attracts New $25M in Funding. But Some Things Don’t Change.

Edsurge

Knewton has raised $25 million in a new funding round—the eighth since it launched in 2008. Brian Kibby, CEO of Knewton Getting into the courseware business marks a major pivot for the New York City-based company, which originally licensed its adaptive learning technology to publishers. Sample screenshot of what students see in Alta.

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Pearson Bets on Adaptive Learning (Again) With $25M Acquisition of Smart Sparrow

Edsurge

Last week, Pearson announced it paid $25 million to acquire Smart Sparrow’s technology, in a move that the publisher says will bolster the digital infrastructure that will soon support all its future higher-education offerings. The following year, Knewton was bought in a deal that has become a poster child for education technology hype.

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Open Doesn’t Guarantee Outcomes: It Creates Opportunity

Iterating Toward Openness

He writes: To me, both cyberspace and OER are tools that I think can be used to generate positive outcomes, but can also (very clearly I think) be used to generate outcomes I don’t support, like political polarization or business models that sell us back our experiences rather than proprietary content. Nate is absolutely right.

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Pearson Signals Major Shift From Print by Making All Textbook Updates ‘Digital First’

Edsurge

The biggest education company in the world is moving away from a production model that has been one of the main drivers in the rising cost of textbooks. higher education courseware sales in 2015. We need to be asking this of all digital materials, even open educational resources.” It doesn’t matter what a student wants to use.

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