Pearson Education to Integrate Digital Textbooks With CourseCompass

Posted on March 30, 2001

Pearson Education, an education publisher, and netLibrary, Inc., a provider of ebooks and content management services, announced a partnership under which they plan to create digital versions of hundreds of 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 elearning platform. Pearson plans to make up to 100 digital textbooks available via the CourseCompass platform by the fall of 2001.

CourseCompass is an elearning platform to enable educators to customize 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 upload course documents by following on-screen instructions and create links directly to the digital textbooks without having any HTML experience.

``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 ebookstore at MetaText.com. 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.''



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