article thumbnail

As Textbook Companies Try New Options, Many Students Say Price Is Biggest Factor

Edsurge

One crucial part of the decision is out of the students’ hands, of course, since it is the professor who decides what textbook or material to assign—or whether to skip commercial textbooks altogether and assign a free or low-cost open educational resource, or OER. He tends to buy used textbooks because they are cheaper. a semester.

Company 135
article thumbnail

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

Edsurge

Already, the Sydney, Australia-based company has pulled back on its social media presence. Its accounts on Facebook and Twitter are no longer active, as an education industry analyst noticed. On its website , the company claims it has more than 700 institutional customers across the K-12, higher education and corporate learning space.

Pearson 98
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Why ‘Personalized Learning’ Can Feel So Impersonal

Edsurge

Technology companies—in all industries—make users anxious when they describe their work with the vagueness of a magician. Rather than answering the question, lazy entrepreneurs too frequently offer vacuous references to companies like Amazon and Netflix. (In fact, Quartz suggests that education services are the. Source: Quartz.

article thumbnail

What Happened to Amazon Inspire, the Tech Giant’s Education Marketplace?

Edsurge

At the time, the company got a talking to from teachers in comments on its Facebook page for Amazon Education. The Amazon executive who spearheaded the creation of Inspire, Rohit Agarwal, left the company in March “to pursue other opportunities.” Inspire wasn’t Amazon’s first move into education.

Education 111
article thumbnail

Why We Should Expand Our OER Advocacy to Commercial Publishers

Iterating Toward Openness

They understood the outsized influence that billion dollar behemoths like Microsoft would continue to have, and knew that the only way the open source model could “win” would be if proprietary software companies adopted it. releases of the Linux kernel came from employees at Intel, IBM, Google, Facebook, Samsung, RedHat, and SUSE.

OER 80
article thumbnail

Advocacy Group to DOJ: Cengage-McGraw Hill Merger Could Create a ‘Platform Monopoly’ in Education

Edsurge

The 49-page brief argues that the merger would hurt competition, limit innovation and could lead to an eventual “platform monopoly” in education, just as Facebook dominates social networking. The joining of our two companies will allow us to offer students even more value and more affordable options to access textbooks and course materials.”

article thumbnail

A New Model for OER Sustainability and Continuous Improvement

Iterating Toward Openness

I’ve been interested in sustainability models for OER for decades. And for just as long, I’ve believed that there are useful lessons for us to learn on this topic from open source software – OER’s far more popular and influential sibling. What does “bug” mean in the context of OER?

OER 147