{"id":14916,"date":"2016-11-16T13:53:25","date_gmt":"2016-11-16T18:53:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/disrupting-textbooks-with-digital-content\/"},"modified":"2018-06-27T09:42:30","modified_gmt":"2018-06-27T13:42:30","slug":"disrupting-textbooks-with-digital-content","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/disrupting-textbooks-with-digital-content\/","title":{"rendered":"Disrupting Textbooks with Digital Content"},"content":{"rendered":"

McGraw-Hill Education is an educational publisher, known for textbooks in K-12 and higher education. The organization has approximately 21% market share in higher education and 19% market share across K-12 as of 2015 [1]. Printed textbooks were the traditional source of educational material and content since 1821, but information digitization and increased access to the internet has challenged education publishers.<\/p>\n

Prior to the digitization of content, educational publishers were in a very protectable industry \u2013 the barriers to entry were high as investments needed to be made initially to create content and produce textbooks. Publishers could charge high prices for their content as schools and districts lacked access to the content without textbooks.<\/p>\n

Given their stable place in the market \u2013 textbook publishers stopped ensuring that they were providing the best content for their customers. They failed to differentiate for students at various levels of understanding, and didn\u2019t provide engaging material for teachers to use in their classroom. Author Beverlee Jobrack supported this, saying: \u201cPublishers are incentivized to create materials that appeal to teachers who don\u2019t want to change, so curriculum materials [that could be more engaging\/effective] \u2026 are less profitable.\u201d[2]<\/p>\n

But with increased access to the internet, educational content became much more low-cost and easily scalable. By putting educational content on the web \u2013 any teacher or student can access the content without needing a printed book. Given that traditional educational publisher like McGraw-Hill didn\u2019t quickly provide engaging content online, other ed-tech providers quickly came in and took advantage of an opportunity to disrupt. New content providers such as Khan Academy, DreamBox, LearnZillion, Front Row Education\u00a0are able to take advantage of some clear new business models:<\/p>\n