Challenge
Over the past several years, classrooms have shifted to a more individualized model of education to better meet each student's needs. While this offered McGraw-Hill an incredible opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to providing customers with state-of-the-art, adaptive learning systems, it also required them to divide their focus from printed textbook and materials and redefine themselves to deliver more digital content and systems that allow personalized learning for students.
However, developing, delivering, and maintaining these digital educational programs is time-consuming and costly, and at the time they wanted to break into this market, much of their resources were still devoted to printed textbooks and content. They needed a framework in place so they could continually grow and build out their digital content without over-extending their budget. At the same time, they already had established processes and operations in place to maintain the success of their printed content and didn't want to take away from this essential part of their company.
Moving to a digital focus while continuing to deliver high-quality content required McGraw-Hill to improve their processes and products around advanced technology and increase efficiency when building applications and digital content. They knew partnering with a company experienced in developing technology solutions was key, and that’s how the long and collaborative relationship between MHE and our Fusion team began.
Solution
McGraw-Hill needed to partner with a company experienced in developing technology solutions and turned to Fusion for thought leadership, strategic vision, and to leverage our team of application developers, scrum masters/project managers, quality assurance resources and technical product managers. We initially sat down with them to determine three key objectives :
- Improve processes and products employing advanced technology
- Implement scalable frameworks
- Increase efficiency when building applications and content
In order to meet these objectives, we started by leading the architecture and business-case discussion for deploying cloud-native application services that would serve over 4 million students. This project's success led McGraw-Hill to expand their application services across their digital platform group. At the same time, Fusion introduced Agile development principles and the Scrum development framework so they could successfully scale their classroom technology solutions.
Our team helped McGraw-Hill continue to grow their footprint in the digital space by assisting them in developing and delivering several products to support their classroom technology endeavor. We also worked with them to build on existing processes and infrastructure to save time and reduce costs compared to building from scratch.
Because of the continued partnership with Fusion, McGraw-Hill has quickly developed products that offer strategic value in learning-science initiatives, and now they are poised to compete on a new level beyond printed content and textbooks. Their foresight into digital education enabled them to stand out in a changing market as they continue to partner with Fusion to continue learning-science initiatives.
