e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Kim Thanos

  • New e-Literate TV Episode – CourseWare: What Comes After the Textbook

    We’ve just published our fourth episode in the e-Literate TV pilot series. This one is about CourseWare. Frequent e-Literate readers will know that this is a topic Phil and I think is important and growing in importance. You’re most likely to have heard of the products from the big publishers—Pearson’s CourseConnect, McGraw Hill’s SmartBooks, Cengage’s MindTap, and Wiley’s WileyPLUS—but there are also a lot of smaller entrants that are worth paying attention to.

    For this episode, I got to interview two of my favorite people in ed tech: Soomo Publishing’s David Lindrum and Lumen Learning’s Kim Thanos. Both of these folks run small companies that are doing good and novel work with the courseware product category without having huge technology budgets or whizzy adaptive engines. And they have some really interesting things to say about how the advent courseware changes the way we have to approach the development of curricular materials.

    Take a look.

  • No, really, courseware is a thing now

    In the operating plan slide deck that Cengage recently released as a consequence of their bankruptcy proceedings, the executive summary slide says that a key element of their strategy is “driving aggressive digital growth in a course model.” “Course solutions” is mentioned three times in the deck as well. Cengage, as a company, is essentially betting its future on courseware. Not just digital products in general, but courseware in particular.

    But they are hardly the only provider building content in this relatively new category. I thought it might be useful to provide a run-down of who is doing what in this space. It turns out that there is a pretty wide range in terms of approaches to the product category.

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