McGraw-Hill Education, the learning sciences company, has announced a commitment to open technology standards that will lower barriers to integration and allow anyone to build personalised learning experiences that integrate with the company's technologies. The company announced Microsoft Corporation as its first open technology provider in a collaboration that will enable educators to build their own ‘compound learning objects’ through Microsoft Office Mix and seamlessly integrate them into McGraw-Hill Education's learning platforms. Through this vision, educators, students and developers are able to personalise and enhance McGraw-Hill Education's courseware by creating and combining content that leverages the power of the company's adaptive and analytics platforms.
McGraw-Hill Education's embrace of open learning represents one of the biggest steps yet in the company's transition from a publisher to a learning science company delivering intelligent platforms and services alongside content and results-focused course design. The shift supports the increasing demands of educators and students to combine learning elements from multiple sources to create learning experiences that are distinctive, personalised and improve results.
Open learning environments exist with the expectation that educators and students will integrate, mash-up or extend content to make the learning experience more personal. Open learning systems are better able to meet the diverse needs of learners and also allow for creative experimentation—all while keeping data private and secure.
McGraw-Hill Education will provide analytics to support student achievement and a framework for keeping educators at the center of the learning process. Enabling the company's move toward open is a commitment to the learning technology standards developed by the IMS Global Learning Consortium, a nonprofit organisation that is one of the leading bodies in setting technology guidelines for the learning community.
The announcement extends McGraw-Hill Education's existing commitment to open standards. The company's Engrade platform currently integrates with over 40 different partners, with some K-12 districts using the platform with content sourced from McGraw-Hill Education and others. In addition, MH Campus relies on open standards to allow educators and students to use McGraw-Hill Education products in conjunction with most major learning management systems in the higher education market.
A key component of McGraw-Hill Education's relationship with Microsoft is the ability of educators to develop compound learning objects through Office Mix, a media-rich extension of Microsoft PowerPoint that is free to the education community, and combine them with McGraw-Hill Education content and technology. A compound learning object is a pedagogically-linked group of reusable digital content and assessment items related to a single learning objective. The components of a learning object are designed to work together to enable students to master learning objectives and supports educators as they assess students' mastery of learning objectives.
McGraw-Hill Education plans to launch this new capability beginning in the fall of 2015 with a library of compound learning object available to educators. Compound learning objects will serve as the basis for all of the company's K-12 products going forward starting next year, with its higher education portfolio soon to follow. McGraw-Hill Education is reorganising its development models around learning objects in order to create smaller chunks of content that can be more easily revised, updated, found, reused and assembled to meet changing needs; to generate data to support analytics-driven instruction and personalised learning; and to increase its ability to build repositories of aggregated content that can be deployed nimbly and efficiently.
McGraw-Hill Education is also working with the New York University's Polytechnic School of Engineering and Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development to explore the adaptive possibilities around these learning objects, providing an even greater degree of personalisation.
