Going Digital in High-Growth International Markets

Situation

HMH is focused on expanding their global reach into new high-growth international markets with 100% digital offerings. The desire is to solve those local barriers to entry in order to go digital sooner with all the advantage to learning that their dynamic, interactive, media-rich learning resources provide. “Access to strong educational content is one of the most powerful tools we have for overcoming economic and social challenges,” said Tim Cannon, EVP, International Markets and Global Strategic Alliances, HMH. Currently only a fraction of HMH's international sales are digital.

Challenge

Ongoing challenge of Internet access: Many schools around the world continue to struggle to support persistent high-speed Internet connections and most students have little or no access outside of their school, presenting a major challenge in delivering media-rich interactive learning experiences. Without solving this challenge there is a limit to the number of students that can reached with the new comprehensive digital programs coming online.

Taking interactive media-rich content offline: Traditional eBooks that take basic textbook reading materials offline is not sufficient when you want to provide the benefits of an interactive, media-rich learning experience. Students’ mobile devices are typically limited in storage capacity and taking the software required for an individual’s interactive materials offline is a challenge.

Manage large-scale customization and distribution of educational resources: Localization and personalization of educational resources is a key benefit of going digital. The challenge is making it easy, easy to customize and easy to manage the updates.

Unifying all learning resources into a single package: Although it may seem secondary, providing all reading and interactive learning materials, assignments and assessments in one place, in the desired sequence, helps teachers manage their class and provides students a more engaging, distraction-free experience.

Solution

Comprehensive solution that addresses key challenges…

Trunity eLearning platform solution: a simple but powerful unified solution to manage content from authoring / publishing to the classroom. Fully integrates content creation, content management, standards alignment, custom curriculum design and learning management with the end-users’ personal and social learning experience. Built in tools for content creation and content management provides publishers and educators the ability to easily create and manage customized coursebooks to meet local needs. Allows teachers to add or create new content including, articles, videos, tests and assignments and then publish to their classroom as desired.

Trubooks: the all in one cloud-based digital textbook package, combining publishers’ media-rich content with learning management and social learning features. Trubooks technology provides students and educators access to their personal instance of a digital textbook title.

Learning Content Management System (LCMS) – Allowing publishers to offer customized versions of their standard titles.

Live-Cross Publishing (LCP) – technology solution allowing content from multiple sources to be assembled and updates of a single master version to reach all LCP versions

Trubooks Mobile: The Trunity mobile app for tablets provides users seamless online/offline access to their personal library of Trubooks, including all media-rich interactive content. Trubooks Mobile also gives users the option to selectively cache only the content they currently need for offline use in order to conserve storage space on their device.

Benefits

Students can get their homework done on or offline: "Our partnership with Trunity allows us to offer our dynamic, interactive digital content to customers in both on- and offline environments, which is particularly important in countries where students may not have reliable internet access. Students will be able to access the customizable curricula offline from multiple devices by downloading individual chapters, interactive resources and assignments."

As a global learning company with a collection of award-winning proven content they now have the capability to deliver custom arrangements of their content to meet local needs and different course curriculums: "Utilizing Trunity's powerful content management capabilities, HMH's educational content can be organized to support numerous curriculum designs and requirements while incorporating a variety of rich, dynamic media such as videos, animations and interactive lessons."

Enhanced individual learning experience: "Students on the platform are also able to collaborate in an engaging, social learning environment with administrators and educators, enabling greater interaction and an enhanced individual learning experience."

Results

Successful full-year pilot in the United Arab Emirates:   15 schools with over 4,000 students and 150 educators participated in the pilot.

Stronger engagement: Showed stronger student and teacher engagement with digital content and increased demand for the following year

A major new international customer: Allowed HMH to land the Institute of Applied Technology, with over 20 campuses throughout the United Arab Emirates. 

Full digital launch of HMH's award-winning science programs to the international market: Holt McDougal Physics, Holt McDougal ChemistryScience Fusion