Vital Source Technologies, Inc., Ingram Content Group's global leader in building, enhancing and delivering e-learning content, has acquired the assets of CourseSmart, a provider of digital textbooks in the higher education market.
CourseSmart's strengths in inventory, instructor sampling and analytics will be integrated with Vital Source's reader platform and global, scalable distribution network. By combining the two organisations, Vital Source will offer the world's largest digital content catalogue and provide better digital content solutions for the higher education community.
CourseSmart was founded in 2007 by Macmillan, Cengage Learning, John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill Education and Pearson with a simple goal of providing instructors a better textbook evaluation service. The company has since expanded to become a leader in providing digital learning content to the higher education community. CourseSmart has millions of users around the world and offers access to over 90 percent of core higher education titles as e-textbooks along with the largest catalogue of e-resources and digital course materials.
The company will offer a best-in-class digital content platform and will be committed to pioneering new technologies in areas like accessibility and analytics. It will provide more options for institutions, more inventory for faculty and course designers, and greater scalability for content creators and resellers.
Customers of both CourseSmart and Vital Source will not experience any immediate changes to their service. All products and services will be maintained and supported until the full system integration occurs.
Vital Source is the largest, most accessible digital content channel in the world. The VitalSource Bookshelf platform is the most used e-textbook delivery platform in higher education with more than 4 million users across 6,000 campuses around the world. It uses the latest technology to enhance the learning experience through e-textbooks and digital education. Content from more than 500 of the world's top academic publishers is available to VitalSource Bookshelf platform users, including those living with disabilities, on a variety of operating systems and devices.
