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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

The following year, Knewton was bought in a deal that has become a poster child for education technology hype. Department of Education to improve access to open-licensed educational materials, or OER. Ben-Naim says the acquisition by Pearson could “affect the plan,” which was to build OER content on Smart Sparrow.

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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

Even though Pearson is not cutting out print completely, its digital-first update strategy may still alienate some faculty, says Wiley, who is currently the chief academic officer of Lumen Learning, a company that provides digital OER courseware to colleges and universities. “It It doesn’t matter what a publisher wants to sell.

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