Learning Resources

McGraw-Hill Education To Enable Personalized Learning Experiences

• By Michael Hart
• 04/08/15

This fall, McGraw-Hill Education will launch new technology in conjunction with Microsoft that will allow educators to build their own "compound learning objects" that can be adapted to individual classes or even students.

Company representatives said this launch marks a significant step in moving McGraw-Hill Education from a publisher to a "learning science" company that meets the demands of educators and students to combine elements from multiple sources to create personalized learning experiences.

"We're committed to becoming the world's foremost learning sciences company, and we see open technology as a key element of our future," said McGraw-Hill Education President and CEO David Levin.

Teachers will be able to use Microsoft's Office Mix, an extension of Microsoft PowerPoint that will be free to the education community, to incorporate multiple digital content and assessment items from a catalogue of McGraw-Hill Education content and technology and create a learning object with a specific learning objective.

Levin said the compound learning object will be the centerpiece of all the company's K-12 products in the future, followed eventually by the same concepts in higher education.

In reorganizing its development models around the compound learning objects, McGraw-Hill Education said it hopes going forward to:

• Create smaller chunks of content that can be easily revised, updated, used and assembled with other chunks of content to meet changing needs;
• Generate the necessary date to support analytics-driven instruction and learning; and
• Build repositories of aggregated content that can be deployed quickly and efficiently.

"We know that students and educators want learning experiences that are deeply personal," Levin added, "and often this means combining content from multiple sources, including content they have produced themselves."

McGraw-Hill Education is working with researchers at New York University to develop new potential products focused around the compound learning objects.

"When teachers and students are given the chance to engage with compound objects in adaptive learning environments, they personalize how and when they learn, resulting in active experiences that deliver superior outcomes," said Robert N. Ubell, vice dean of online learning at New York University's Polytechnic School of Engineering.