Education materials publisher McGraw-Hill Education, US, has a new partnership with the University of Minnesota Bookstores. The partnership allows the company to provide e-books to large numbers of students at reduced prices, helping to make college more affordable and improve student performance.
Through this two-year partnership, McGraw-Hill Education will provide its complete catalogue of e-books and adaptive learning products to University of Minnesota students at a significantly discounted rate. In this new business model, the bookstore – which has access to enrolment information and the course materials assigned for each course at the university – will identify the digital materials each instructor requires for their classes and then directly bill students' bursar accounts for those materials. The end result is that students will see significant savings and will have automatic and immediate digital access to their course content through their college's learning management system on any browser-enabled device.
The University of Minnesota, which enrolls nearly 65,000 students, participated in an earlier e-book pilot programme with McGraw-Hill Education, Internet2 and Courseload that was also designed to make e-books more affordable and accessible. This new partnership strengthens McGraw-Hill Education's relationship with the university as well as the University of Minnesota Bookstores, which provides significant value in its ability to interface seamlessly with university administration, faculty and students.
At the University of Minnesota, McGraw-Hill's e-books can interface with an entire suite of the company's online learning platforms, including McGraw-Hill Connect (all-digital teaching and learning platform), McGraw-Hill LearnSmart (online super adaptive study tool) and Tegrity (a fully searchable lecture capture service). LearnSmart, which has been used by nearly 1 million students since its launch, has been shown to improve students' course performance by one full letter grade.
The new e-book program will begin in the fall 2012 semester.
