At the same time, the company wants to avoid causing friction for students who are accessing the technology legitimately. Cengage has to meet its internal security requirements to protect its intellectual property against piracy and content sharing. Managing security needs has been equally challenging. “We've been growing at about 20 to 25% a year in student activations-keeping up with that demand has been a huge effort.” Security to protect students-and prevent pirates “We have devoted tremendous resources to meeting the expectations of millions of students waiting until the night before to do their homework,” Moore says. “On any typical Sunday night we'll have 3 to 4 million students rushing to get their homework done.” Downtime is not an option. “About 20 million students are currently enrolled in college and the majority of them are Cengage customers in one way or another,” says Moore. Cengage needed to ensure its platform could scale to meet the needs of millions of students at once, and maintain performance standards.
That becomes a particular challenge during huge traffic spikes. “It's expected that just like a dial tone, we have to always be on.” “Students and professors can't work around our maintenance schedules or technical glitches,” says Moore. Their overall priorities are reliability and performance-Cengage needed to earn the trust of educators and students through consistent, stable performance. Performance and reliability, scaled to millions of studentsĪs part of its transformation from 100-year-old publishing house to modern cloud-based software company, Cengage now has a large software engineering team, product development team, and a traditional IT team that runs Cengage’s warehouses and business processes. The take-up has been huge: currently, about 80% of revenue comes from digital products (compared to 10% in 2013) millions of students and teachers across the country and beyond use Cengage online products. Offering an online subscription was one way: instead of a $250 textbook, students can pay less than half of that for Cengage Unlimited – a first of its kind subscription service for textbooks and course materials that gives access to the complete Cengage library of books and study aids.
How do we transform into a technology company? How do we meet our customers where they are, drive affordability, and create more engaging learning experiences?” “But we also knew that the way we engage with education had to change. “We knew we needed to lower prices,” says Moore. That hurt the company’s revenue it also negatively impacted student success rates.
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Students were buying used books, acquiring PDF copies, pirating online resources, or just not bothering with textbooks at all. “We were a great business that struggled to make it into the digital age,” says George Moore, chief technology officer for Cengage.
It’s been a huge and ultimately successful reinvention for Cengage, driven by necessity-seven years ago, the company emerged from bankruptcy, determined to reposition itself as a software company for the education sector. Today, the company is the largest US-based education and technology organization, offering a wide range of digital solutions globally for grade school, post-secondary, and continuing education-textbooks by subscription, distance learning courses, online databases, at-home quizzes, and test preparation materials. Digital transformation for accessible education, improved outcomesĬengage began over 100 years ago as a publisher of traditional schoolbooks.
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