Oxford University Press (OUP) has launched its e-learning Epigeum program in India. Epigeum can be used by colleges and universities for providing online and offline education. It currently offers courses across multiple domains and topics including plagiarism, management and leadership and research. Epigeum claims to have 92 online courses used by 280 universities in 29 countries.
OUP acquired Epigeum for $16.3 million in May 2015. Epigeum, which was founded in 2005, is a spin off of the Imperial College London. The Imperial Innovations Group co-founded Epigeum and sold its 17% stake in the company to OUP at the time. A month before that, OUP acquired the Germany based language portal bab.la for an undisclosed amount. Bab.la provided crowdsources dictionaries online in 25 languages, translation and language learning features.
Previous OUP programs in India:
– In August last year, OUP launched its online English learning and assessment product called Oxford Achievers targeted at school children in Class I-VIII in Hyderabad. The company planned to launch its maths learning solution Oxford Maths and Oxford Educate Premium, digital textbooks by the end of 2015.
– In July 2015, OUP launched 3 digital platforms: Oxford Educate Premium, Oxford Achievers and My Maths for school going children. Oxford Educate integrates ebooks with interactive tools and learning material.
Developments in e-learning this year:
– Earlier this month, the Government of Rajasthan’s education department tied up with Cisco to use the latter’s Connected Learning solution for its academia. Cisco and the Rajasthan Government would provide 50,000 hours of annual training through digital classrooms.
– In June, the Savitribai Phule Pune University launched its e-learning content and digital classrooms.
– In May, AISECT launched ‘Aisectmoocs.com’, a free online Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform, in partnership with Ireland based ALISON group.
– In the same month, NIIT partnered with edX, an online learning platform to introduce Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) module in both their platforms.
– In January, McGraw Hill Education India tied up with Edutor Technologies’ IGNITOR to provide MHE’s Education book catalog in a digital format and distribute across universities and colleges.
Push for digital literacy: Note that in February, Telecom and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that the government aimed to make at least 50% of the Indian population digitally literate in 3 years, from the current 15%.
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