Pearson: "Always Learning" - and improving its product experience
Pearson is a world leader in education services technology. A highly customer-focused company, Pearson seeks to make a measurable impact on improving someone’s life through learning. Over the years, the company has focused on the complete education spectrum from the digitization of textbooks to virtual learning environments to secure test and assessment platforms.
The Pearson & Ness Team
For more than 6 years, Pearson has partnered with Ness, leveraging engineering rigor and Agile implementation to achieve rapid results and build exciting new products. The partnership has enabled distributed development teams to work on a single platform/product and achieve unified product release goals. Ness has helped make product and program management simpler and more transparent with dashboard views of multiple aspects of product development.
We aim to become ‘the efficacy company.’ To do this we must transform from a company that simply creates inputs to education — such as online courses, books, and assessments — to one that is focused on delivering successful outcomes.
Pearson
Implementations like this, along with other productivity improvements, have delivered Pearson cost savings of up to 15% year-over-year for certain products.
As their platforms continue to evolve, Pearson is working side-by-side with Ness to find new ways to engineer products to be consumed globally and effectively reduce development and maintenance costs — without compromising the user experience. This approach is a critical part of Pearson’s journey to become “the efficacy company,” transforming from an organization that creates inputs to education — online courses, books, and assessments — to one that is solidly focused on outcomes.
Relationship Highlights:
- A suite of tests to validate knowledge in math, reading and writing as students prepare to enroll in college-level courses. The tests identify strengths and weaknesses and improve skills through interactive online learning tools. Ness is leading the application development, technical upgrade, customization, Quality Assurance and application support.
- A leading Virtual Learning Environment for schools with more than 160 million logins per year and available in 25 different language across Europe, Latin America, China and Australia. Ness maintains the application and is responsible for the end-to-end testing and test automation.
- A customizable, integrated performance review system that assists users with creation, storage, retrieval and scoring of electronic portfolios including all types of artifacts — photo, video, audio and document files. Ness designed and developed the platform to integrate with third-party software for audio, video streaming and document sharing (the key aspect in the assessment workflow).
- A K-12 web-enabled Learning Management Software (LMS) platform for delivering online and interactive enhancements to textbooks. Ness leads the product development and manages release planning, production deployment and post-production support using Agile ATDD methodology and the Selenium test automation framework.
- A second-generation iPad application that helps teachers assess students’ reading skills while providing a browser-based dashboard for user management and reporting. Ness is leading product discovery, design and IOS prototyping, and will continue through the complete product development life cycle.
To learn more about speeding innovation with Ness, contact us today.