Learning Innovation

William Rieders is Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer for Cengage Learning. Prior to joining Cengage Learning, William was a partner at The Parthenon Group, a consulting company with a robust practice in education. Moving from consulting to publishing gives William a perspective on higher ed that is different from those of us that make our living teaching and working within the walls of the university.

My girls will head off to college in 2015 and 2017. They are in the 10th and 8th grade of our our local public high school and middle school. We are already getting glossy university brochures in the mail (I guess from my older daughter's PSAT scores).

House of Cards, a Netflix streaming only drama starring Kevin Spacey, may have a few things to teach us in higher ed:

There seems to be a good deal of chatter in the system about students eventually (or sooner) ditching laptops for tablets. Today, a student tablet is mostly synonymous with a student iPad - but maybe that will change in the future. (Are you seeing your students carrying around Android devices?)

The highlight for me of Super Bowl XLVII (which I watched by streaming online) was when the power went out in the Superdome. This was a perfect tech failure because it makes us feel so much better about all of our tech failures.

Before I started blogging I never really spent time with people that work in public relations (PR).

CourseSmart is the world’s largest platform for eTextbooks and digital course materials. CourseSmart has over 40,000 titles from more than 50 publishers and over 3.5 million student and faculty users. CourseSmart Analytics provides faculty with a platform to develop insight into how students are interacting with the digital texts that they assign. Robust analytics seems to be the logical next step of the move from print to digital in curricular materials.

This post is intended to open up a dialogue with the leadership at Adobe. I hope that people at Adobe read this post in the context of a larger discussion that is going on about the merits of outsourcing, a discussion that The Economist captures really well in its recent Special Report: Outsourcing and Offshoring. Please do not mistake these concerns about outsourcing e-learning product development and support with any negative arguments partnering with colleagues from India. As I've written in other places, I very much believe that India is positioned for a source of strength in e-learning in the years to come.