McGraw-Hill Education and Knovation Team Up, Bringing Engrade Users Searchable and Curated Online Resources

AUSTIN, Texas, March 7, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- McGraw-Hill Education, a learning science company, and Knovation, a leader in online resource curation, today announced a collaboration to expand and simplify educators' and students' access to professionally-evaluated, standards-aligned digital content. The companies will provide users of McGraw-Hill Education's Engrade, a learning management and assessment platform for K-12 education, access to the Knovation Content Collection with more than 360,000 online learning resources, including videos, white papers, games, podcasts and articles using a single integrated search.

Engrade unifies the data, curriculum and tools that educators use every day to drive student achievement and inform district educational strategy. Supporting open standards, Engrade seamlessly integrates all of a district's content and assessment providers through one site with one sign-on, bringing together the delivery of digital instructional content, assessments and student performance data.

Every resource in the Knovation Content Collection goes through a rigorous certification process that includes vetting for relevancy and standard-alignment, and tagging each resource according to a variety of criteria for searchability. As a result, educators trust that the resources found in the Knovation Content Collection, including Open Educational Resources (OER), are ready to be incorporated into instruction.

"Learning technology has advanced more in the last five years than the last fifty, but a lack of openness done in the right way is one of the key factors keeping it from having the massive effect on results that it should," said Stephen Laster, chief digital officer of McGraw-Hill Education. "We're excited to partner with Knovation to support a more open, collaborative and easy-to-use learning environment. By providing Engrade users with simpler access to high-quality curated OER, we can accomplish our goals by putting students and educators in a better position to achieve theirs."

Knovation brings order to a wealth of free online resources, including OER, by selecting, evaluating, tagging and maintaining a collection including resources from hundreds of K-12 content providers, as well as actively mapping their metadata structures to the open standards Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) and Common Education Data Standards (CEDS). Experienced classroom teachers and curriculum experts evaluate and tag the resources in the Knovation Content Collection, ensuring instructional relevance and comprehensive coverage for all grade levels, subject areas and learning needs.

"Long before digital transformation or OER were trending topics, we realized that free online resources could engage students and improve learning if they were well organized and presented for easy access," added Randy Wilhelm, chief executive officer of Knovation. "There's no better company for us to join forces with than McGraw-Hill Education; combining the power of their adaptive learning technologies with Knovation's expertly curated online learning resources takes personal learning to the next level by empowering schools to offer each student an experience that is tailored to their individual learning styles." 

To learn more about how Knovation's curated online resources will be integrated into Engrade, please visit McGraw-Hill Education's SXSWedu lounge at the Hilton Austin Downtown, Room 406.

About McGraw-Hill Education   
McGraw-Hill Education is a learning science company that delivers personalized learning experiences that help students, parents, educators and professionals drive results. McGraw-Hill Education has offices across North America, India, China, Europe, the Middle East and South America, and makes its learning solutions available in nearly 60 languages. Visit us at mheducation.com or find us on Facebook or Twitter.

About Knovation
Knovation makes it easy to find, organize, and share free digital content for learning.  Knovation's curriculum experts professionally evaluate, standards-align and continuously maintain a collection of hundreds of thousands of online resources covering all subject areas, all grades and all learning modalities. The Knovation Content Collection can be accessed through the company's award-winning solutions, netTrekker and icurio, or through custom integration with instructional systems (LMS') and assessment platforms. Since 1999, Knovation has delivered on the promise to do something good for kids, every day by helping districts meet the needs of diverse K-12 learners in digital learning environments. For more information, please visit http://www.knovationlearning.com.

Contact:
Tiffany Eckelberg
McGraw-Hill Education
(646) 766-2434
tiffany.eckelberg@mheducation.com

Robynn Anton
Knovation
(513) 612-1039
ranton@knovationlearning.com

SOURCE McGraw-Hill Education