Pearson Education, the world’s leading education publisher and a business of Pearson plc, and netLibrary, Inc., the leading provider of e-Books and Internet-based content management services announced a partnership under which they plan to create digital versions of hundreds of the world’s most popular college-level textbooks over the next twelve months. Among the titles planned for release in digital form are such best-selling textbooks as Kotler: Marketing Management; Campbell/Mitchell/Reece: Biology; Brown/LeMay/Bursten: Chemistry; Horngren/Harrison/Bamber: Accounting; and Parkin: Economics.
Under the partnership, Pearson Higher Education and netLibrary’s MetaText digital textbook division will also integrate limited feature versions of these digital textbooks with products offered through CourseCompass-Pearson’s customized version of Blackboard’s highly successful e-learning platform. Pearson plans to make up to 100 digital textbooks available via the CourseCompass platform by the fall of 2001.
CourseCompass (www.coursecompass.com) is the first e-learning platform to enable educators to easily customize extensive Pearson content offerings and integrate them with the educational materials they develop themselves. Educators using the integrated Pearson/MetaText offerings will be able to manage their courses from a personalized CourseCompass home page. In addition, they can easily upload important course documents-from simple MS Word(R) documents to PowerPoint(R) presentations-by following simple, on-screen instructions and create links directly to the digital textbooks without having any HTML experience.
In the three months since its commercial release, Pearson’s CourseCompass program has grown rapidly, currently supporting more than 200 of Pearson’s textbooks with original content offered through the most successful and easy-to-use e-learning platform on the market today.
For the first time, educators are in control of their students’ online learning experiences. This new development combines an educator’s own original material with Pearson Higher Education digital content, personalizing student learning in a way never before possible. Students have at their desktops continuity of online and print resources combined with embedded assessment and real-time feedback, said Jim Behnke, senior vice president and director of Pearson Education’s Central Media Group.
The Pearson Higher Education/netLibrary partnership gives netLibrary the right to resell Pearson’s digital textbooks through its e-Bookstore at www.MetaText.com. The plan to deliver digital textbooks-either directly or bundled with new printed textbooks available with CourseCompass-provides professors with greater choice and flexibility as they design and build their online courses. According to Herb Hilderley, senior vice president of publisher relations for MetaText, Pearson’s commitment to bundling MetaText editions with key titles is a giant leap forward in the evolution of the digital textbook market. Professors and students will now have the ability to see the power of the Web applied to some of the nation’s leading textbooks.
The addition of digital textbooks to CourseCompass is the latest development in Pearson’s plan to offer its customers more compelling and useful online content experiences. According to Behnke, CourseCompass has had tremendous market impact this semester. The added convenience of digital textbooks should further solidify CourseCompass as the e-Learning platform of choice, especially among educators who do not consider themselves technologically sophisticated.
Through the collaboration of Pearson and netLibrary/MetaText, CourseCompass instructors can invent more effective approaches to reaching their students where they live-online. And since the digital textbook will always be accessible in CourseCompass, the connection between the online course and the relevant textbook content will be just a mouse-click away. Powerful resources such as full-text searches, links to relevant Web sites, and online glossaries will be easily accessible to students who will be able to maintain the continuity of an uninterrupted online learning experience.
