McGraw-Hill Higher Education Breaks New Ground With Innovative Online Courses

In higher education where institutions are competing to attract students and budgets are often tight, more colleges and universities nationwide are looking for opportunities to more efficiently expand course offerings, serve students beyond the traditional classroom, and increase enrollment. McGraw-Hill Higher Education's Online Learning team is addressing these needs with a new line of interactive online courses, ranging from Anatomy & Physiology to Principles of Management. Combining cutting-edge technology and comprehensive instructional design, McGraw-Hill's innovative online course offerings provide a unique resource for higher education institutions to reach a broader audience and offer a wide range of subjects and curricula in a flexible teaching environment.

More than a dozen institutions, including Louisiana State University, Penn State University, Arizona State University, and the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, have become early adopters of McGraw-Hill's online courses and have begun integrating more than 100 online courses, collectively, into their own course offerings.

"I examined all the leading online materials and I chose McGraw-Hill's because they were the only ones with a true online course," said Professor Diane Reddy, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "Rather than an electronic version of a textbook, McGraw-Hill had a fully developed online course. As a professor, I could not develop an online course with richer content than what McGraw-Hill developed. Their attention to course design and student achievement really shines through."

Jeff Schultz, vice president, McGraw-Hill Online Learning, explained, "McGraw-Hill Higher Education's comprehensive online courses empower educators to create a more interactive, customized learning experience for their students -- both online and in the classroom. Online instruction is becoming an integral part of today's university system, and McGraw-Hill is at the forefront of this trend."

These online courses for undergraduates provide a flexible solution for two-year and four-year colleges and universities. Working closely with higher education instructors in relevant disciplines,

McGraw-Hill defined the most important and most challenging concepts that learners must master to successfully navigate particular courses. Based on this information, the online course developers plotted the most effective and efficient route to subject mastery. In addition, teams of subject matter experts, instructional designers, course writers, and content editors developed the courses around clear learning outcomes correlated with Bloom's Taxonomy, which provides a standard structure for categorizing test questions when assessing student learning. These approaches to course development set McGraw-Hill's online offerings apart from all other online courses currently available.

McGraw-Hill Online Learning now offers more than 30 online undergraduate courses in a variety of basic studies, ranging from Medical Law and Ethics to Introduction to Psychology. Fifty additional online courses are currently under development and scheduled to be available by the end of 2007. By 2008, McGraw-Hill Online Learning plans to have a library of 150 online courses on the market.

Because each course topic is self-contained, courses may be customized within just about any learning management system. Instructors are able to adapt online courses as they wish, adding their own content and using any textbook. The courses also include animation, graphics, streaming video, and interactive activities to enliven the content and motivate the learner. Also, McGraw-Hill's courses are compliant with accepted industry standards (SCORM) for online education and address government standards regarding accessibility for the disabled.

Additional information about McGraw-Hill's online courses is available at http://www.onlinelearning.com/.

About McGraw-Hill Online Learning

McGraw-Hill Higher Education's Online Learning team provides interactive digital content and activities aligned to learning objectives that work with most major learning management systems and the instructor's textbook of choice for the higher education market. McGraw-Hill Higher Education is a unit of McGraw-Hill Education, a leading global provider of instructional, assessment and reference solutions that empower professionals and students of all ages. McGraw-Hill Education, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies (NYSE: MHP), is located in 33 countries and publishing in more than 40 languages. Additional information is available at http://www.mheducation.com/.

SOURCE: McGraw-Hill Higher Education

CONTACT: Tom Stanton
McGraw-Hill Education
(212) 904-3214
tom_stanton@mcgraw-hill.com
or
Tammy Detrich
McGraw-Hill Online Learning
(317) 817-9290
tammy_detrich@mcgraw-hill.com

Web site: http://www.mheducation.com/
http://www.onlinelearning.com/