Dive Summary:
- Pearson extended its digital expansion yesterday with the purchase of Learning Catalytics, a cloud-based learning analytics and assessment system founded in 2011 and developed by Harvard's Eric Mazur, Gary King and Brian Lukoff.
- Essentially a student response system, Learning Catalytics also allows instructors to split their classes into groups based on similar abilities, allowing them to organize feedback by students' comprehension of the material and pair off in-class groups accordingly.
- Pearson is estimated to have spent less than $5 million on Learning Catalytics, which was already working with around 10 institutions.
From the article:
... The idea is that peer-to-peer engagement can help improve student understanding of core concepts, so the startup’s platform aims to make it easy for teachers to break class down into groups for based on their response patterns. This allows teachers to let students with a more advanced understanding of the topics at hand help get their peers up to speed, while allowing the teacher to supervise and curate those groups more effectively. ...