Ed Tech has followed a torturous development path since the first realizations that textbook tomes were on the way out, and that what was coming would somehow take advantage of the communications revolution underway for more than 2 decades now. (or longer if one counts from the first PCs arriving, affordably, in homes, and schools, across the US.)
Many a school district still has warehouses full of obsolete ed tech equipment that they never really managed to deploy effectively. Many an Ed Tech startup and Ed Tech Goliath have come and gone in the intervening years, but, as with commercial space development, such stopping and starting and traveling in circles is to be expected because there is so much to accomplish, and tech can take much longer than blue sky projections.
Which is prelude to a look in on what is currently happening with Pearson. They have been zigging and zagging and trying to stay afloat in an immature Ed Tech market; at one point they bought Knewton, the Adaptive Learning leaders for a time. Then Pearson decided to walk away from Adaptive Learning, and ushered Knewton down the path to nowhere.
But times change, and change again, and now Pearson is back at the Adaptive Learning approach, as this article reports.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Pearson-Bets-on-Adaptive-Learning-Again-With-25M-Acquisition-of-Smart-Sparrow-EdSurge-News.pdf”]