Pearson: Revenue Challenges and Digital Initiatives
January 26, 2016
I used to follow Pearson when it owned a wax museum and a number of other fascinating big revenue opportunities. Today the company is still big: $8 billion in revenue, 40,000 employees, and offices in 70 countries. (Lots of reasons for senior executives to do field trips I assume.)
I noted that that Pearson plans to RIF (reduce in force) 4,000 employees. Let’s see. Yep, that works out to 10 percent of the “team.” Without the wax museum as a job option, will these folks become entrepreneurs?
I read “Turning Digital Learning Into Intellectual Property.” The title snagged me, and I assume that some of the 4,000 folks now preparing to find their future elsewhere were intrigued.
The write up reported:
Pearson is also positioning itself as a major center for the analysis of educational big data.
Ah, ha. A publishing outfit involved in education is getting with the Big Data thing.
How is a traditional publishing company going to respond to the digital opportunities it now perceives?
big data analysis methods will enable researchers to “capture stream or trace data from learners’ interactions” with learning materials, detect “new patterns that may provide evidence about learning,” and “more clearly understand the micro-patterns of teaching and learning by individuals and groups.” Big data methods of pattern recognition are at the heart of its activities, and Pearson ambitiously aims to use pattern recognition to identify generalizable insights into learning processes not just at the level of the individual learner but at vast scale.
Yes, vast. Micro patterns. Big Data.
My mouth is watering and my ageing brain cells hunger for the new learning.
Big questions have to be answered. For example, who owns learning theory?
I recall my brush with the education department. Ugly. I thought that most of the information to which I was exposed was baloney. For evidence, I think back to my years in Brazil with my hit and miss involvement with the Calvert Course, the “English not spoken here” approach of the schools in Campinas, and the seamless transition I made back to my “regular” US school after having done zero in the learning aquaria for several years.
I also recall the look of befuddlement on the face of the check out clerks, when I point out that a cash register tally is incorrect or the consternation that furrows the brow when I provide bills and two pennies.
My hunch is that the education thing is a juicy business, but I am not confident in Pearson’s ability to catch up with the folks who are not saddled with the rich legacy of printing books and charging lots of money for them.
This is a trend worth watching. Will it become the success of Ebsco’s “discovery” system? Will it generate the payoff Thomson Reuters is getting by reselling Palantir? Will it allow Pearson to make the bold moves that so many traditional publishing companies have made after they embraced XML as the silver bullet and incantation to ward off collapsing revenues?
I for one will be watching. Who knows? Maybe I will return to school to brighten the day of an adjunct professor at the local university. (This institution I might add is struggling with FBI investigations, allegations of sexual misconduct, and a miasma of desperation.)
Education. Great stuff.
Stephen E Arnold, January 26, 2016
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Awesome post.