Pearson Education (see also Pearson PLC) is a British-owned education publishing and assessment service to schools and corporations, as well as directly to students. Pearson owns educational media brands including Addisonâ€"Wesley, Peachpit, Prentice Hall, eCollege, Longman, Poptropica, Scott Foresman, and others.
Pearson is part of Pearson PLC, which formerly owned the Financial Times. It was created in July 1998 when Pearson PLC purchased the education division of Simon & Schuster from Viacom and merged it with its own education division, Addison-Wesley Longman, to form Pearson Education. Pearson Education was rebranded to Pearson in 2011 and split into an International and a North American division.
Although Pearson generates approximately 60 percent of its sales in North America, it operates in more than 70 countries. Pearson International is headquartered in London, and maintains offices across Europe, Asia and South America. Its online chat support is based in the Philippines.
Pearson North America is headquartered at 330 Hudson in New York City, New York. It previously was located in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.
Pearson Italia SpA, also known as Pearson Paravia Bruno Mondadori, was created through the purchase of PBM Editori, which was in turn a merge of Paravia (based in Turin) and Bruno Mondadori (based in Milan).
Imprints
Pearson and Higher Education: Learning Together - Learning, it's what we do together. We inspire each other by trading ideas, sharing passions and watching each other grow. When we come together, whether in the classroom or even online, the...
Pearson has a number of publishing imprints:
Partnerships
Pearson has partnered with five other higher-education publishers to create CourseSmart, a company developed to sell college textbooks in eTextbook format on a common platform. In 2010, Pearson agreed to a 5-year, $32 million, contract with the New York State Department of Education to design tests for students in grades 4-8.
GreyCampus partnered with Pearson for higher-education teaching-learning solutions under the Learningware brand.
Que Publishing, a publishing imprint of Pearson based out of Seattle, partnered with AARP in order to develop and add to a series of technology books for seniors. The series, which includes My iPad For Seniors, and My Social Media for Seniors, are large-print and colorful.
"Pineapple-Gate"
In the spring of 2012, tests that Pearson designed for the NYSED were found to contain over 30 errors, which caused controversy. One of the most prominent featured a passage about a talking pineapple on the 8th Grade ELA test (revealed to be based on Daniel Pinkwater's The Story of the Rabbit and the Eggplant, with the eggplant changed into a pineapple). After public outcry, the NYSED announced it would not count the questions in scoring. Other errors included a miscalculated question on the 8th Grade Mathematics test regarding astronomical units, a 4th grade math question with two correct answers, errors in the 6th grade ELA scoring guide, and over twenty errors on foreign language math tests. In May 2015, the Wall Street Journal online reported British comedian John Oliver reviewing problems with Pearson's standardized tests on his HBO series Last Week Tonight.
Technology products
Pearson's products include MyMathLab and Mastering Platform.
Cogmed
Pearson owns Cogmed, a brain fitness and working memory training program founded in 1999 by Swedish researcher Torkel Klingberg.
StatCrunch
In 2016 Pearson acquired StatCrunch, a statistical analysis tool created by Webster West in 1997. Pearson had already been the primary distributor of StatCrunch for several years.
InformIT (publisher)
InformIT, a subsidiary of Pearson Education, is an online book vendor and an electronic publisher of technology and education content.
InformIT.com is one of the web sites of the Pearson Technology Group, and one of several sites in the InformIT Network. This site features free articles, blogs, and podcasts on IT topics and products, as well as a bookstore carrying all titles from these imprints. Publishing imprints represented on InformIT.com include Addison-Wesley Professional, Cisco Press, IBM Press, Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference, Que Publishing, and Sams Publishing.
The other sites in the InformIT Network include:
- Peachpit.com: Peachpit has been publishing books on graphic design, desktop publishing, multimedia, Web design and development, digital video, and general computing since 1986. Peachpit is the publishing partner for Adobe Press, lynda.com, NAPP, Apple Certified, AIGA Design Press and others.
- FTPress.com: The book publishing imprint related to the Financial Times newspaper, FT Press creates books in the areas of general business, finance and investing, sales and marketing, leadership, management and strategy, human resources, and global business. FT Press is the publishing partner for Wharton School Publishing.
Safari Books Online joint venture
In 2001, the Pearson Technology Group and O'Reilly Media LLC formed a joint partnership called Safari Books Online, to offer a web-based electronic library of technical and business books from InformIT's imprint partners and O'Reilly Media. The InformIT Network offers access to this service via its web sites. Pearson sold its interest in Safari Books Online to O'Reilly in 2014.
See also
- Educational publishing companies
- List of largest UK book publishers
- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- McGraw-Hill Education
References
External links
- Official website (UK)
- Official website (USA)
- Official website (Canada)
- Official website (India)