McGraw Hill Gets In On the Mobile Education Market

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/26/mcgraw-hill-gets-in-on-the-mobile-education-market/

A couple of timely education items hit my inbox this morning. First, a report suggests that U.S. students suck at science. From the report,”less than one-half of students are demonstrating solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter.” Granted, ‘science’ is an extremely broad term and encompasses many different disciplines, but the gist of that report is pretty troubling. This might be a good time to remind readers of Scitable, Nature Publishing Group’s free online science library. Although limited in scope to genetics, cell biology and ecology, they’ve been growing since last we covered them, with many new articles as well as a new guide to life science careers and English Communication for Scientists. The latter, alone, should be worth your time today.

Also word comes today that McGraw Hill is jumping into the mobile education market with their upcoming mConnect platform: “an open-standard mobile learning platform designed to bridge the skills gap in emerging markets.” mConnect will initially roll out in India, and will, much like Scitable, have a strong focus on cellphone-as-learning-device. Specific details are lacking right now, but mConnect looks to be a more general education initiative.

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