Pearson Plc. Case Study

About Us: Pearson Plc.is the world's largest education company that has headquarter in London, United Kingdom. At present it has over 35,000 employees working in  more than 70 countries providing wide variety of educational products and services to various institutions, governments and individual learners with the aim of helping people to aim higher and fulfill their true potential. 

Revenue:€4.552 billion– FY 2016

SWOT Analysis:

The SWOT analysis for Unilever is presented below:

Strengths        

1. Colloration with Microsoft: In October 2016, Microsoft has partnered with global education company Pearson, to work on integration of 3-D and mixed  reality into its secondary and university level curriculum. Both the companies are planning to transform HoloLens into various learning  tools  including  online  tutoring  and  coaching.  By  the  school  year  2018,  Pearson  will  offer  curriculum  in  health,  commerce, history and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) on Windows Mixed Reality devices.

 As the current generation of students is well-versed with laptops, i-pads, and smartphones, these innovative methods of teaching guarantee more participation from students. To cater to the school students’ needs, education providers such as Educomp, Tata Class Edge, Pearson, and TeachNext have been coming up with interactive software to aid teachers in classroom teaching. However, usage of digital technologies in institutes of higher education is still in its nascent stages and efforts are being made to fine-tune these technologies to adapt to the needs of University students

 The same quality of education is not maintained in tier-3 schools and universities in both rural and urban areas. For this reason, IIT has introduced the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL),  a government funded initiative,

Schools across the country are using technology seamlessly to engage with students and achieve desired results through well-planned learning methods. Most schools utilize digital tools such as smartboards, LCD screens, audio-visual videos, digital recordings of older lectures  and so on to teach children difficult as well as easy concepts.

There is a long way to go for digital education to gain momentum in India, as the majority of India lacks the required digital bandwidth.  A few of the roadblocks faced are infrastructure issues and digital literacy. Moreover, the course content is fragmented, as it is taught in many languages and not available on any single vendor platform.

However he contends that there are other on-the ground challenges that universities have to deal with. “There is very unrealistic teacher-student ratio. The University Grants Commission (UGC) should release funds to implement these digital services. With the ever increasing teacher student ratio, it becomes very unrealistic for a teacher to give complete attention to his students.  For example, to teach the subject of ‘Commerce’, sometimes, there is one teacher who is probably teaching nearly 400 students in a year. Monitoring this kind of exchange will be very difficult and all colleges and schools should upgrade their technology.”

Another problem is of reluctance on the teacher’s part to get trained and adopt digital technologies. The primary teachers have been forthcoming in using these tools, but a few senior teachers from high school are of the impression that these disruptive technologies are out to replace them permanently. Added to this is the frequent problem of power cuts and voltage fluctuations causing network issues.

Digital Education in India  Frost Perspectives Information & Communication Tech. 28 Apr 2016

Pearson’s commercial LMS solutions work with educators to design, build, and support online courses.

They provide on-demand software services such as course management, virtual campuses, assessment,

reporting, and retention monitoring tools and support services. Pearson’s solutions are also somewhat

positioned around its content. Apart from these, OpenClass is an open source offering from Pearson that

is completely free and easy to use. Pearson’s LMS solutions have over 10 Million end users.

In the LMS Space Blackboard is the market leader with 63.6% market share whereas Pearson currently has 6.1%..

Internet of Things (IoT) in education crossed $11,806 Million in revenue in 2015. The IoT in

education market is characterized by the need for a connected learning ecosystem to

measure learning outcomes across digital learning solutions to improve graduation rates,

improve faculty effectiveness, and minimize operational inefficiencies.  

Major trends in IoT in the education market include increased integration across digital

learning solutions in the education ecosystem, utilization of Big Data Analytics to impact

student learning outcomes, hyper-connectivity to bridge the global digital divide, and an

increase in lifelong learners.

• In an extremely competitive market, customers value an easy to use, seamless user

experience across digital learning solutions and devices, analytics that are actionable and

ongoing professional development for faculty and administration, training support for IT

teams, and an attentive customer support.

Append the list for Queries 1) Do we have to fill up NMIMS details in the fields specified for Post Graduation Details or is it just for those who have done PG prior to joining NM?