Pearson Education is a leading global education company. It publishes educational, technical, and professional materials, textbooks, digital on-line and educator professional development courses.
The company's assessment business, which includes testing and curriculum, has grown rapidly in the past decade. As a result, it has become one of the biggest players in North American testing.
Education Services
Educators around the world use Pearson Education's curriculum products to teach students. But the London-based company announced that it will soon sell off its print and digital curriculum business in the U.S. This will reduce the scope of Pearson's business and will give it a smaller footprint in education.
The sale, which will raise $2 billion, was made by Pearson — which formerly owned the Financial Times — to a private equity firm. This move will help the company focus on assessments and virtual schools, said chief executive John Fallon.
Fallon, who took the reins at the company two years ago, inherited a jumble of businesses that he was trying to bring together into one coherent unit. The result was a series of overlapping systems that were storing information in the wrong places and making it difficult to get a single view of customers.
He's been focusing on customer service and evolving the way he delivers education services to make it easier for users to find what they need quickly. This includes implementing new customer service tools, such as mobile-friendly websites and live chat support.
This is part of a wider effort to streamline the company's operations and make it more efficient. It's also helping it avoid some of the cost pitfalls that have come with buying and maintaining multiple systems.
The goal is to create a unified and comprehensive set of solutions that will allow teachers to easily access what they need for their classrooms. They include CoursewarePLUS, a collection of courses that can be used to build a school's online curriculum; and Teaching for Impact Professional Development, which offers an alternative to traditional in-person training.
These programs are based on a model of learning that's focused on providing high-quality, personalized education to meet each student's unique needs. They include a combination of online and in-person instruction, as well as opportunities for students to interact with each other through social media and other digital channels.
In a recent survey of students, 75% of them indicated that they preferred to take online classes for their education. Many of these students want to take stackable credentials, which provide them with a way to prove that they have the skills employers are looking for. This is a growing market for online courses, and it's something that Pearson Education is aware of and preparing to address with new offerings, said Michael Field, senior equity analyst at Morningstar.
Education Materials
Pearson offers a wide range of education materials and digital solutions, including textbooks, online content, learning tools and teacher professional development resources. These products are used by students and teachers around the world.
To meet the needs of every learner, we have designed our curriculum with a variety of learning styles and ability levels in mind. The educational materials we create are curated by educators with years of experience. They include activities and exercises that promote critical thinking skills and foster a student's curiosity and respect for diversity.
Our instructional content helps educators deliver powerful lessons that motivate and educate students. It is rigorously tested and validated, providing the information educators need to make effective classroom decisions. It is also aligned with state and national standards.
Educators can evaluate the quality of their instructional material using a variety of tools, including IMET and EQuIP. IMET is an evaluation tool created by Student Achievement Partners that uses rubrics to assess if a textbook is aligned with Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
EQuIP is an evaluation tool designed to help teachers identify instructional materials that meet or exceed CCSS requirements. It provides a list of vetted educational materials that are aligned with CCSS, as well as recommendations on how to select them.
Real World Context: Developing life and work skills is an essential part of educational success for adult learners. Whether it's learning to navigate the world of work, communicating with co-workers or completing a job application, our English language learning (ELL) programs are developed with practical language and timely topics to encourage students' development of reading, writing, listening and speaking skills.
The company is dedicated to providing a comprehensive portfolio of high-quality products and services to enable students to achieve long-term outcomes. Its business segments are Assessment & Qualifications, Virtual Learning, English Language Learning, Workforce Skills and Higher Education.
The company's revenue has been growing year-on-year since 2018. Sales in the Assessment & Qualifications segment have increased. However, the sales growth has slowed in the English language learning and workforce skills segments, where sales decreased yearly.
Education Technology
Pearson Education is a world-leading education publishing company that provides educational technology, assessment tools, instructional materials, textbooks and digital content. Its products are used by over 100 million students worldwide. Its educational technology is designed to facilitate online learning.
In order to provide students with a more personalized and adaptive learning experience, Pearson has developed an array of e-learning technologies and resources. The company has a range of software applications that use data analytics to determine the best way for students to learn. This enables Pearson to design a more effective learning program for each student.
The technology is part of a larger strategy that seeks to build a global infrastructure for learning through the digitization of education. This infrastructure is based on the collection of huge amounts of enumerable educational data, its processing and calculation, as well as its visualization and interpretation through various data analysis, pattern recognition and machine learning techniques.
This technology is being mobilized in a manner that radically changes the ways that learning is conceptualized, measured and understood. This is not just an attempt to secure new market niches, but rather a critical reconfiguration of existing conceptualizations and measurement methodologies that have been the expert preserve of social scientific forms of expertise throughout the 20th century.
It is a critical reconfiguration because it is generating new governing knowledge and practices by re-enacting and mobilizing the methods of digital analysis that are derived from overlapping disciplinary traditions of computer science, statistics and learning sciences. In this sense, it is an act of'methodological maximalism' that socializes these methods as a set of operational practices for the governing of learning (Ozga, 2011).
Through its Learning Curve and CDDAAL centers, Pearson is providing statistical indices and data visualizations to support its claim that learners can be compared to algorithmic norms and globally standardized classifications of learning progressions through the analysis of massive populations of individual learning records. These data visualizations allow learners to see their performance against a virtual reference space, and to compare themselves against the algorithmic norms they might encounter when working on different assignments.
Education Solutions
Pearson is a world-leading education company with well-known brands like Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, and Longman. Schools and students around the globe use Pearson products to achieve academic success and develop professional skills. The company offers curriculum textbooks, educational materials in local languages, and online learning products as well as testing, assessment, and qualification services.
As a global leader in education, Pearson delivers the content, technology and academic support that powers many of the world’s most successful online programs with its eCollege business. Founded in 2007, eCollege has become a powerful force in online education with the industry’s most advanced, scalable and dependable SaaS learning platform - Pearson LearningStudio.
For English language learners, Pearson helps students advance their English proficiency to meet career goals and participate in life-changing opportunities through its wide selection of research-based ELL content. Providing practical language and timely topics, these programs help students master grammar along with reading, writing, speaking, and listening.
Using AI to deliver more interactive and personalized experiences, Pearson partnered with Microsoft to transform its Longman Welcome to English program with multiple AI-based services. These include an interactive digital course that provides real-time feedback on pronunciation, and an AI-based assessment that enables teachers to provide more accurate, individualized feedback.
Pearson also uses AI to deliver more personalized and engaging learning solutions for Chinese students. The company has been transforming its Longman English-language learning materials in China since 2015. As part of this transformation, the company worked with Microsoft Research Asia and the Azure Speech product team to integrate new AI capabilities into its products and build AI-based speech to text, reading, and pronunciation services.
The company was also challenged to get a complete view of its customers’ needs and history, which would enable it to offer faster, more personalized customer service. It needed to create self-service resources and communities that were accessible from anywhere, at any time.
Pearson also partners with correctional institutions to provide online tools that help inmates continue their learning, regardless of internet restrictions. By giving inmates the opportunity to learn and grow their knowledge, Pearson hopes to decrease recidivism.
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