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Being “late to the party” in terms of digital development is not proving a disadvantage for Cengage Learning as it transforms from textbook publisher to education technology company, according to its bullish c.e.o. Michael Hansen (pictured).
Cengage emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2014 and placed 14th in last year’s industry Global Ranking of publishers, with revenue of €1.4bn. It has developed its digital resources, notably interactive learning system MindTap, with a series of recent partnerships and acquisitions.
In 2014 it partnered with “big data” software company Celebrus Technologies and invested in Flashnotes.com, a study materials marketplace that enables students to offer their class notes for a fee. Last year it acquired edtech company Learning Objects, offering adaptive online learning programmes to Higher Education institutions, and bought San Francisco-based Pathbrite’s Portfolio Learning Platform, which enables students to tag and save their work, building “an inventory of learning achievements”.
Hansen says the company is now seeing “wonderful growth” in its digital products. MindTap has sold “well over” one million units in the US and 18 further territories, with sales last year “growing four-fold year on year from a small base”.
When Hansen took over at the company in 2012, it was “in a very precarious state”, he says. “We were losing market share, our books were overpriced, we had zero growth in our digital products. But sometimes desperate situations breed good decisions. Because
it takes time to develop digital products in the way we’ve now developed MindTap, we actually led with service. We went into the market and we said: ‘A lot of faculty are very nervous about adopting something because they feel they are left to their own devices. They can’t even load the student directory, and as for analysing the data, they have never done this.’ What we are doing is literally hand- holding. If you adopt our product, you get one person, one name, with a mobile phone number. You can call this person day or night.
“If you ask a relatively objective set of faculty in the US, they would say: ‘Cengage is by far the service leader.’ It was born out of a difficult and mostly defensive move but I think we have attained that position—and we are defending Hansen thinks the really groundbreaking aspect of technology in education is that it makes the learning process transparent. For the first time, teachers can observe how a student learns through data and analytics tools. “It’s the most profound technology revolution that we have seen in education,” he says.
Convincing teachers to make the online learning move means showing them the data: “They want visibility on their class. Until mid-term, you don’t know how students are doing [if you don’t have the data that online teaching systems can provide], and then half the term is gone and students are leaving and flunking out. If you can tell them two weeks into the course: ‘Here is your population of 60 students, Jane and Joe are progressing very well, they spend on average two and a half hours a day on this subject and have mastered it in this period of time, but here you have a group of students who are simply not engaged enough and you need to spend your time with them,’ then that is typically a big reason for faculty to adopt [our system].”
Cengage now offers tailored time management learning to non-traditional students, such as single mothers working day shifts and learning at night school. Hansen says: “If you’re the student and you’re saying, ‘I only have 30 minutes, I have a mid-term [exam] coming up, I know I don’t have a prayer of getting an A, but give me the content that will help me get a C, and give me that content in 30 minutes or less’, we can give you that now because we’ve tagged the content in certain ways. We’re now seeing this kind of customisation really take hold in the education space.” He accepts this approach can be controversial with teachers: “Teachers are going, ‘No, no, no, here is the body of knowledge— you have to learn everything’, but the single mother is saying, ‘No, I need to finish this degree and for you to help me get a job.’”
Hansen admits Cengage was “late to the party” in digital, but is confident that doesn’t mean missing out. He claims rapid tech developments have meant Cengage can “incorporate technology that is much more open [than its rivals].” The market is still nascent, he says. “There’s plenty of room and frankly the others have—and I’m not saying this with any schadenfreude—challenges. Pearson made a lot of acquisitions and it did it fast and it did it well, and it clearly won [the early battle]. But now it has to integrate [those acquisitions] under the MyLab umbrella. There is always a flipside when you go fast and acquire a lot of different platforms.”