[Philip Lelyveld comment: Pearson takes on Udacity, Coursera, and EdX.]
Pearson should be among the walking dead of global media conglomerates, fatally wounded by the shift to digital media. Pearson is the world’s largest book publisher and dominates the market for textbooks, which are facing a competitive attack from inexpensive or even free course material online.
But education has been one of the last holdouts against the onslaught of computing and communications advances, and that’s given this 168-year-old company time to adapt. It grew sales in its education division by nearly 70 percent to $7 billion over the last four years, as profit margins also increased. That alone has lifted the company’s overall results as its other two main divisions—Penguin, a publisher founded in 1935, and the group that publishes theFinancial Times—have grown more slowly.
But setting up and running the required infrastructure isn’t a job colleges want to do themselves. So this fall, Pearson spent $650 million to buy EmbanetCompass, a startup with technology that helps universities launch online courses.
Read the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506361/the-education-giant-adapts/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121123