As the old saying goes, to know where we’re headed, we need to know where we’ve been. That’s why this Black History Month we’re looking back at the incredible African-American women in STEM who pushed the equality envelope—in terms of both gender and race. These trailblazers were smart, savvy, and tenacious. And because these ladies refused to take no for an answer in the past, our current generation now has access to freely pursue an education in the science, technology, engineering, and math fields. Let’s take a moment to reflect on the African-American women whose passions, contributions and legacies in STEM created our present reality. First African-American woman physician in the U.S. Rebecca Lee Crumpler February 8, 1831 – March 9, 1895 Rebecca Crumpler was able to accomplish what few black women—or men—were able to in the 1800s: she was accepted into medical school. She attended the New England Female Medical College in the years leading up to the Civil War—while slavery was still in existence in the South. Once the war broke out, Crumpler was forced to put her studies on hold and even lost some financial aid in the process—yet she persevered. Not only was Crumpler the first African-American woman to become a doctor, but she also traveled to Virginia to lend her medical expertise to the war-torn state. First African American Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders August 13, 1933 - present Born to poor sharecroppers at the height of the Great Depression, Dr. Jocelyn Elders has an impressive academic background. She was valedictorian of her grade school and earned a B.S. in biology, an M.D. from the University of Minnesota, and an M.S. in biochemistry. She also joined the United States Army where she was trained to be a physical therapist. In 1987, her impressive educational background and career led to her becoming the first African-American woman in the state to become Director of the Arkansas Department of Health. It was only upward and onward from there. Dr. Elders eventually became the first African American Surgeon General of the United States. First African-American woman to travel to outer space Dr. Mae Carol Jemison October 17, 1956 - present Dr. Jemison is living proof that no matter what your dreams are (or how many dreams you have) it’s possible to achieve them. As a young girl, Jemison wanted to become a scientist and knew it was her destiny to one day take off to outer space. But aspiring scientist and astronaut wasn’t the end of her dreams—Jemison was also passionate about dancing. When this trailblazer graduated from Stanford with a chemical engineering degree, she was unsure if she should pursue her doctorate or become a professional dancer. While she ultimately chose to become a doctor, dancing would always be a part of life—so much so she would eventually find herself dancing in zero gravity. On September 12, 1992, Jemison finally fulfilled her destiny and became the first African-American woman to travel in space aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour. The real-life trailblazers behind “Hidden Figures” The movie “Hidden Figures,” based on the book of the same name written by Margot Lee Shetterly, is up for several Academy Awards at the end of this month. The popularity of this movie is shedding light on the little-known African-American women who helped the U.S. win the Great Space Race back in the early 60s. Take a look at the real-life feats these women accomplished as they perused their passion for STEM. Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson August 26, 1918 - present Even though she was often referred to as “The Human Computer,” the path to education was not an easy one for Katherine Johnson. The public school system she was a part of did not offer to educate African American students past eighth grade. So, despite Johnson’s apparent aptitude, her parents had to find workarounds to ensure she could continue her education. These efforts paid off, and Johnson would go on to make significant contributions to NASA, including the calculations that made John Glenn's monumental orbit around Earth possible. Mary Winston Jackson April 9, 1921 – February 11, 2005 Not only was Mary Jackson passionate about science, but she was also committed to inspiring young students to get involved in the field. According to her NASA biography, she voiced her concern about the lack of passion the African American children at her local community center had for science: “Sometimes they are not aware of the number of black scientists, and don't even know of the career opportunities until it is too late." She would go on to becoming the mentor those children needed. Jackson actively pursued her engineering career and ended up working at NASA for 34 years. She was NASA’s first black female engineer and held the most senior engineering title available. Dorothy Johnson Vaughan September 20, 1910 – November 10, 2008 When asked what it was like to be an African-American woman working at NASA during the 50s and 60s, Vaughan responded, "I changed what I could, and what I couldn't, I endured." Her endurance and leadership resulted in a 28-year career at NASA as the first African-American woman to supervise a staff at the center. Vaughan even anticipated that computers would eventually eliminate many of the positions her staff held, so she took preemptive measures to teach her team programming languages to prepare for the upcoming changes. The above is only a handful of the trailblazing African-American women who paved the way for success in STEM. These inspiring figures, and their legacies, are constant reminders that we should never take education for granted. While we have a lot more work to do with regard to gender and racial equity in STEM areas of study, I’m grateful for the month of February to honor the achievements of African-Americans.  ... View more

Macmillan Learning & Benetech Launch 2nd Annual Code Sprint for People with Disabilities Event designed to make digital learning tools accessible for all San Diego, Ca -- Macmillan Learning and Benetech are launching the second-annual Code Sprint for people with disabilities in San Diego, CA on February 28th, 2017. The code sprint is in conjunction with the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference . CSUN is the largest international conference for people with disabilities, focused on creating an inclusive society via innovation and technology. This conference promotes the value technology can play in helping people with disabilities succeed in all facets of life, including education, careers, and independent living. Commenting on the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference, VP of Accessibility at Macmillan Learning, Stephen Davis stated, “It’s incredible to be a part of this vibrant community working to realize the full potential technology can have on the lives of disabled people. While we have strides to make here at Macmillan Learning with our accessibility roadmap, we are driven to deliver on the promise to make our learning resources fully accessible.” The code sprint will be held on February 28th from 9am-5pm at Seasons 52 . Throughout the event, we will identify and design technical, open source solutions to make common, educational interactives (e.g., drag and drop, sliders, sorting) more accessible. Anything created during this event will be open source and shared publicly. Rachel Comerford, Director of Content Standards at Macmillan Learning, commented, “This event will attempt to address some of the most complex challenges students with disabilities face when using learning interactives. We’re crowdsourcing code from a community of programmers who are invested in change. As a result, I look forward to being able to provide usable, accessible materials to every student.” The Code Sprint will leverage insights and best practices from the DIAGRAM Center, a Benetech initiative supported by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs. DIAGRAM Center is a research and development center whose goal is to dramatically change the way digital content for Accessible Educational Materials (AEM) is produced and accessed, so that students with disabilities are provided equal access to the general education curriculum, especially science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Conference participants can also attend our session on usability and accessibility on March 2nd, led by Rachel Comerford, Director of Content Standards, and Kelly Lancaster, Lead Interactive Designer. # # # About Macmillan Learning: Macmillan Learning improves lives through learning. Our legacy of excellence in education continues to inform our approach to developing world-class content with pioneering, interactive tools. Through deep partnership with the world’s best researchers, educators, administrators, and developers, we facilitate teaching and learning opportunities that spark student engagement and improve outcomes. We provide educators with tailored solutions designed to inspire curiosity and measure progress. Our commitment to teaching and discovery upholds our mission to improve lives through learning. To learn more, please visit our website or see us on Facebook , Twitter , or join our Macmillan Community . About Benetech: Benetech is a different kind of technology company. We’re a nonprofit whose mission is to empower communities in need by creating scalable technology solutions. Our work has transformed how over 450,000 people with disabilities read, made it safer for human rights defenders in over fifty countries to document violations, and equipped environmental conservationists to protect ecosystems and species all over the world. Our Benetech Labs is working on the next big impact. About CSUN Assistive Technology Conference: The Annual International Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities has grown to approximately 5,000 participants with presenters and exhibitors sharing technology devices, services and programs. Participants have represented all 50 states, numerous territories and more than 35 foreign countries. The conference attests to the perception that disability is an international issue. The widespread application of assistive technology forms a common basis for the delivery of accommodation services to people with disabilities on a worldwide basis. The conference serves as an annual meeting venue for many organizations involved in the delivery of assistive technology services to special populations throughout the world. ... View more

Recently, I was reading Annalise Mabe’s great blog post on connecting through writing, and the impact of social media on our writing situation – both the unintended, usually negative, consequences and the ones glimmering with hope on the horizon, the possible outcomes worth striving for.  The outcomes that inspire composition instructors each new semester to set aside past disasters and keep bringing technology and social media into the writing classroom.   Annalise’s post reminded me that the French word essayer is the verb to try.  So to write an essay is to write an attempt: at understanding, at giving meaning, at making a human connection.   That essay might take a long form, such as those we read in our favorite online publications, or it might take the form of a rambling social media post.  (I won’t quite call a tweet an essay, but feel free to disagree with me in the comments.  It sounds like a fascinating debate!)  Polished or scattershot, print or digital, the essay is not an outmoded form, as some have claimed, it is the linguistic manifestation of the human experience, lived out in 12 point font or scrawled on a napkin.    It is this definition – this striving – that I think gives the essay its best hope of having meaning for future generations, whether or not they study French. Or even English.  The essay as an attempt connects the writing of the classroom with endeavor in the real world.  Students might not feel inspired by “Once More to the Lake,” no matter how much of a paragon E.B. White may be.  But they know who is saying what about the social issues that matter to them.  Whether it is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip hop retelling of the history of Alexander Hamilton or Katie Kieffer as an up-and-coming Millennial columnist for Townhall, students are following the words of the people they admire.  By tracking those words, they are tracking social and political currents, keeping an eye on leaders as they try out ideas on a national – and international – stage.  Those words, if you will allow me to set aside strict genre conventions for a moment, are foundationally essays.       One of the great gifts of the Internet is the platform it can create, the readily available audience.  Even as students engage with the language and rhetoric of writers and leaders online, they can also use writing to express their own social justice concerns, their own responses to political upheaval, and their own values as future leaders and citizens.  As they essay these ideas for the audience of the classroom, or the audience of the Internet, they will learn to refine their thinking, to polish their thoughts, so that they leave college with ideas – and words – that can make a difference.    The textbooks I work on every day include sections on “Writing to Convince or Persuade” and “Ethical Arguments.” Even a simple “Cause and Effect” chapter can change the world, in the right hands, if it inspires the right language.  That sounds hyperbolic, but haven’t we all found our lives changed by the right words, read or heard in the right moment?  And this is what students are missing, I think. Both the power they hold and the dark side of the democratization granted us by the Internet.  When everyone’s words are available, when there is no threshold for publication, is it really worth the time to become a strong writer?   The answer to that, like the answers to so many things, is really a question.  In a platform overly saturated with words, how can you be heard?  What will make your thoughts, your ideas stand out, what will bring eager minds to read your work?    It will be the quality, the clarity, the vividness of the words that will bring attention to the message.  Students who want to make a difference – in their own lives and in the lives of others - will need to write well to do so.  Even as they strive in the world, trying to shape it for the better, they will need to strive, to essay, in their writing, as the easiest, fastest way to reach a digital world with a global audience.  The intro-composition class – and the essay – is an important first step. ... View more

Macmillan Learning today announced the acquisition of Intellus Learning, an educational platform as a service company that gathers information across institutions to help faculty and administrators find and evaluate the best, most affordable digital content for each learner while providing actionable data on course engagement and success.  Using a patented approach to machine learning, Intellus indexes the millions of content learning objects in use at an institution and provides real-time analytics on student usage. By organizing the wealth of digital learning assets owned or licensed by the institution, the platform provides transparency to all stakeholders to better inform resource allocation and instructional design. “Intellus’s platform surfaces the best learning tools for students by matching teaching and learning objectives to all available materials. It is incredibly powerful,” said Susan Winslow, Managing Director for Macmillan Learning. “At Macmillan Learning, our goal has always been to provide the best educational content and tools for educators. Intellus allows us to continue that work while supporting institutional budgetary and retention goals.” To read more about this exciting acquisition, click here. ... View more

EdSurge recently published a new online guide: Community College: Digital Innovation's Next Frontier . The guide features six articles offering various perspectives on the challenges community colleges are facing. We are very excited about an article Macmillan Learning CEO, Ken Michaels wrote called: How Community Colleges Can Combine Digital Innovation and Human Connection . The article features a conversation between Ken and Macmillan Learning college success authors, John Gardner and Betsy Barefoot (both renowned in this field). You can read Ken's article here . This guide is a wonderful spotlight on innovation, ed tech, and our country's community colleges. To read all of the articles in the guide, see the links below: How Community Colleges Can Combine Digital Innovation and Human Connection Can Bite-Sized Courses Help More Students Complete Remedial Math? LaGuardia Community College: Where Business and Tech Education Meet I Love Community Colleges (and Tech Should Too) A (New) Bronx Tale: A Community College Embraces Edtech to Give Students a Happy Ending Game On: How Four Community College Professors Spawned the CUNY Games Network We hope you will share the guide with colleagues! (Photo Credit: Shutterstock) ... View more

New Integration to Provide More Seamless Support for Writers, in College and Beyond Macmillan Learning today announced the development of new, integrated writing support within Microsoft Word with their leading online product, Writer’s Help . Powered by Writer's Help , this smart search APP is seamlessly integrated in Microsoft Word, designed to respond to common student questions about writing. Writer's Help Now will give all writers , in college and beyond, quick, reliable answers at just the point when they need them. Providing writers with a resource that allows them to search quickly and get accurate, targeted answers within the writing space so many college students use will help them stay focused and build confidence as they work. “Writing is a skill students learn and continue to hone throughout their college courses,” said Macmillan Learning CEO Ken Michaels. “Educators repeatedly bemoan the common mistake students make when they use unvetted help from the web. By harnessing the best research from our authors to inform a much smarter search, we are offering students just-in-time help while they write. By integrating within Word, students don’t have to leave the application to get that support.”   “Students aren’t necessarily searching for words like ‘ellipses’ or ‘transitions’ when they have questions. Typically, they are more likely to search instead for ‘three dots’ or ‘flow’,” explained Managing Director Susan Winslow. “ Writer’s Help was built on the idea of giving students information exactly when they need it, with the search words they actually use.” Macmillan Learning’s team compiled research, gathering the words that students actually use to search for help in their writing so that the answers and results would be grouped into small, smart, useful categories.   “Students are often intimidated by writing and simply turn to search engines for answers,” commented Macmillan Learning Publisher, Leasa Burton. “Instead of getting vast or inaccurate results, Writer’s Help provides targeted, relevant advice .  It is a process our editors work on continuously so that we can provide the best  experience for students. ” Already in use at more than 500 colleges and universities across the country, Writer’s Help combines content and tools from the most widely used classroom resources available, all from the leading publisher in writing handbooks, Macmillan imprint Bedford/St. Martin’s, including the best-selling textbook in recent history, A Writer’s Reference by Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers. “All writers benefit from seeing a good model,” notes Writer’s Help coauthor Stephen A. Bernhardt. “ Writer’s Help provides some one hundred models of various genres—lab reports, literature reviews, business memos, research papers, multimodal compositions, reflective papers, critical analyses, and many more text types. The model documents all provide excellent examples of well-formatted text to help students to learn.” Writer’s Help Now , with enhanced search for multilingual writers, will be available in 2017. ... View more

When has anything ever been “typical”? The “typical” college experience is shifting dramatically as online education continues to grow, as classrooms embrace new technologies and non-lecture based pedagogies, and as the government pushes for free community college education. The stereotypical story of fresh-faced 18- to 22-year-old students moving straight from high school to  four-year institutions with active on-campus faculties (and, not to mention,  thriving social lives) is no longer the norm. Just as higher education options are multiplying, the higher education student experience is diversifying. When I taught freshman composition at a four-year state university, I assumed that most of my students fit the "typical" story. From the outside, many of them did, but I wish I had dug deeper to see how they challenged this story—and wish I’d found ways to show them how to use their different experiences to shape unique projects and approaches to research and writing. When I taught at a nearby two-year community college, I saw more varied “stories,” but I was too new to the profession to know how to adapt my approach beyond an audience of that fresh-faced 18-year-old from an American high school—because that had been my story. More first-generation students and international students than ever are enrolling in American colleges and universities, and more people are returning to school later in life to complete degrees or embark on new career paths. According to a report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, between 70-80% are working while enrolled in classes, with about a quarter of all full-time college students working full-time jobs (“The Struggle of Work-School Balance”). Tuition hikes and the increasing weight of student loans contribute to these patterns. And there are now online education opportunities that allow students to return to school later in life when they have more financial responsibilities—and, often, children (30% of community college students are parents)—to nurture and support in addition to their studies. Unfortunately, the incredible juggling many of these students must do has led to problems with retention. That last point, especially, tells me that the myth of decreasing student performance isn’t necessarily true: so many students are working harder to do more than ever before, and their work is affected by a multitude of factors, many of them invisible to the instructor at the front of the classroom. This is true for minority learners whose cultures and home lives may differently inform their approach to education and classroom topics, students from a range of socio-economic backgrounds whose level of access to education may affect their work processes, or older students whose additional life experiences and/or high school education in an earlier era may shape their approach to classroom authority or their level of comfort with academic discourse, and others; there are so many experiences. Most instructors know, too, that students’ increasing diversity presents not only new challenges but new opportunities. True, it might be more difficult to assign a recent article on, say, transgender actors in Hollywood or a video of the most recent GOP debate and prepare a discussion based on expected student response. But not knowing what to expect can also force instructors to be more creative in their assignments and to adopt practices that allow—and encourage—flexibility. A diverse classroom is an opportunity for more voices to reflect our diverse world—with a good, collaborative assignment, students can learn from each other and see how different experiences lead them each to shape a different educational path of their own making. The “typical” student, then, is a student of their instructor, their peers, and of themselves. And an atypical student body provides greater opportunities for instructors to be students in their own classroom. Teaching to the “typical” student, then, is impossible. Instead, instructors need to be given the best tools possible to approach their students and course goals, and the best tools possible include flexible options and room for adaptation to the individual student. The Macmillan Community is one such tool—a way to connect with Macmillan authors and with other instructors who are teaching the same mix of students or who are using the same book, and to find out how they bridge the gaps or embrace the differences in their classrooms. In my next post, I’ll talk more specifically about classroom approaches and activities that can help a diverse group of digital natives and returning students work together. Stay tuned! ... View more

Recently at the Campus Technology conference in Boston, Dr. James Caras and Dr. Mats Selen delivered a compelling presentation on the impact of technology in online and blended STEM courses. In the talk, Dr. Caras and Dr. Selen discussed the challenges associated with teaching large, introductory STEM courses, as well as practical solutions to increase student engagement and success rates. Dr. Selen, an award-winning physics instructor from the University of Illinois, employs clickers to engage students in lecture and an exciting tool, iOLab, to help students think like scientists in lab. Interested in learning more? Download the slide deck from the talk below. Tell us how you are integrating technology in your STEM courses in the comments section! ... View more

You'll see us talking quite a bit about SXSWedu in the coming weeks. For those unfamiliar with SXSWedu: it's an awesome education conference held in Austin, TX each year. SXSWedu brings together a community of educators, entrepreneurs, and business folks to discuss the future of learning. The neat thing about SXSWedu is that the education community plays a significant role in the programming for the meeting. Voters (people like YOU!) can visit the PanelPicker page, peruse sessions and vote for the best sessions. Check out our proposed sessions below! If you like what you see, click the thumbs up button on the session page! Voting is open through September 2, 2016. Vote today and tell a friend! The Science of Decision-Making: Justin Wolfers , Betsey Stevenson and Nathan DeWall http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/68102 What critical decision-making skills should students learn? How do we teach students to make good decisions about important questions, such as education spending, employment, or home ownership? How will their abilities to make decisions impact their education & our future workforce? To teach good decision-making, educators should teach students how to avoid mistakes & why we have psychological vulnerabilities that lead us astray. In this session, speakers will discuss the rules of thumb that often lead people to make irrational decisions, guides to good decision-making, & the behavioral biases that psychologists and economists have shown lead people to make mistakes & how to overcome them. Science, Society and Life-Long Learning: Rob Lue , Jason Osborne , Susan Winslow http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/68182 Are we promoting science as a finite learning experience? How are we communicating the significant scientific shifts & breakthrough research to students & to communities? Educators play a significant part in helping students understand the ongoing role of science in our lives, but leveraging our collective intelligence to build learning communities around societal changes provides a path for life-long learning & inquiry. Speakers will discuss ways to develop students' ownership in their education through creating collaborative cultures between K-12 schools, higher Ed institutions, & industry. Panelists will offer ideas on how to encourage students to create authentic, real-world connections. Student Success: Concept to Scalable Solutions : Paul Gore , A.J Metz http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/67609 Questions about student success & retention are the buzz in education, but what do we really know about why students succeed or fail? As it turns out - quite a bit! Entry characteristics like past academic performance, exam scores, & demographics are important predictors of success. But recent research suggests that motivational factors are also important. These factors can increase the predictive accuracy of existing models & identify student needs over time. Using the presenters’ collective years of teaching, research, & consulting experience, this session will review recent data on retention strategies, levels of influence in a student’s career & provide scalable strategies for success. Kindergarten's Lessons on Teaching & Learning: Jim Morris & Melissa Michael http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/61900 Kindergarten has some surprising lessons for teaching and learning at all levels. Kindergarten classrooms often allow students to ask questions, play and explore, struggle and at times even fail, direct their own learning, and practice skills over time. They foster a child’s curiosity about science and the natural world. Project-based learning is common, where the class works together to build something or solve a problem. But does that continue in K12 and higher education? Or do some of our practices stifle the very curiosity and autonomy we want to encourage? In this session, we explore best kindergarten practices and how to incorporate them at different educational levels and settings. ... View more

"The exciting thing about education is that you change lives with it. People's lives change as a result of what we do, what instructors do, what happens in the classroom and beyond, " said Managing Director Susan Winslow‌  in our introduction to Macmillan Learning video.   Across our teams at Macmillan Learning, each employee is focused on supporting learning . Every day, our Marketing colleagues communicate about the content, tools, and services that we offer educators across the country. They work with instructors to find solutions to meet their learning objectives and train them on the most effective ways to use them. In this Employee Spotlight, we feature one of these fantastic Marketing Managers who spend every day learning from our authors so that they can better support educators with the solutions that improve lives through learning.   Time to get to know us - and the amazing people who make up Macmillan Learning!   Meet Emily Rowin, Marketing Manager. Emily Rowin Marketing Manager I work on… our market-leading  English list, with a focus on our digital and print handbooks and rhetorics. The thing I like best about my current role is… working with our sales team and talking to educators from different campuses across the country. My role contributes to learning and education by… providing content expertise to educators. Every day, I consult with professors to learn their goals and what they hope to achieve in their course. We discuss teaching challenges, the current needs of their department, and ultimately, how all of it will impact student learning. I am most excited about the future because… no matter what meeting I have on my calendar, I can count on the fact that my colleague will be making (and bringing)  cookies. :smileylaugh: When I am not working, I am… taking my dog Opey Bear on a run. One little known fact about me is… If I told that to you, it wouldn't be a little known fact. The coolest thing I have seen recently is… a monk that had no choice but travel through TSA pre-check (because getting through security wearing a robe secured by a wooden belt would be a little bit difficult). If a friend asked, I would tell them to join Macmillan Learning because of the… people.  ... View more

Once upon a time, this small town girl loaded up a Honda Civic and drove to the Big Apple, for a summer of interning. Unsure of what the summer would entail, the small town girl headed into Macmillan Learning ready to learn as much as possible about publishing, communications, working in the real world, and surviving adulthood in just a few short weeks. Now that those short weeks have come to a close, and the small town girl is back in her small town world, it’s time to reflect on this summer in the concrete jungle.            Whether your internship took you far from home or just around the corner, the end of an internship means the end of a very important learning experience, and should be remembered as such. Below are some tips to ensure that you make your last few days of your internship as worthwhile as possible. 1) Say thank you Your mom was right: a hand written thank you note can go a long way. They are simple, better than the electronic equivalent, and don’t take too much time to complete. Write one for everyone that made an impact on you during your relationship, whether it be your boss, your work friends, or even the CEO of the company. Taking the extra step demonstrates your dedication and appreciation for the opportunity, and will leave you in good graces with the company. For those work friends and bosses that made a lasting impression on you and who took time from their daily job to guide you, instruct you, or include you in the bigger picture, a small gift is more than appropriate. Whether it be a box of chocolates or some flowers, a small gift will go a long way, and make everyone’s day a lot better. 2) Reach out to the CEO Whether the CEO stayed in their office for most of your time at the company, or was a vital part of your day to day life in the office, sending a quick note to the CEO is a simple task that can go a long way. Not only is it helpful to them to discuss your experience at the company, but also shows that you aren’t afraid to work with coworkers of all different levels. 3) Request feedback Also known as an exit interview, getting feedback about your work performance during your internship is very beneficial to your career process. Carve out some time to sit down with your boss or supervisor, and ask about your performance on the job. What did you do right? What can you improve on? What kinds of things should you keep in mind for your future study or work experience? Any information they can give you will help you out in the long run and better prepare you for future career endeavors. 4) Plan for the future What’s next? Whether it be another year of classes, or hopping straight into another internship, or even a job, start to plan for the future. How will this experience affect your future? How has it impacted your career path? What have you learned that you can speak to in future interview? Answer those questions for yourself and for the next interviewer, because they will certainly be asking you! 5) Trade contact information One of the biggest goals of any internship is to network, so make sure you do it! Trade contact information with coworkers and superiors. Make sure to connect with everyone you can on LinkedIn, and trade business cards if you have them. I recently wrote thank you cards to my coworkers at Macmillan Learning, and I slipped my business card into the envelope with the card. It was a huge success and several of my coworkers commented on how creative and business savvy it was. Leave your mark with the company and your coworkers, because making connections and networking will help you when it comes to joining the workforce after college. 6) Use the contact information It’s all fine and good to trade the contact information, but make sure you use it! Check in from time to time and make sure you keep up with former co-workers from time to time. Otherwise, it is useless to get the information in the first place.  Around the holidays, send a nice email to your boss and check in with the company and their recent adventures. This will keep you up to date on the company and make sure you are remembered in the office. 7) Ask for a reference  Although LinkedIn connections and business cards are great, nothing is quite as good as a written letter of recommendation or letter of reference. Not only is it impressive because you have gained a positive relationship with your employer, but it is equally impressive because your employer took the time to write your reference.  😎 Finish strong After a long summer of hard work, it may begin to feel easy to slack off towards the end. Make sure you do not do this! Finish strong and work hard until the very end, it will go a long way with the executives of the company. 9) Reflect Take a moment in your final days to reflect and look back on your experience. What was your favorite or least favorite part of the internship? What can you improve on for your next internship experience? Taking a moment to look back on these moments will only help you in your future experiences. 10) Stay positive If you’re like me, your coworkers became some of your greatest friends during your internship. That being said, leaving them can be a little tough to say the least. Although your head might be full of worry and fear of not seeing them again, stay positive. They were all interns once, and understand how you feel. This is not the end of the journey, but rather the beginning.                When finishing your summer internship, look to these tips to make the most of your goodbyes, and leave a lasting impression on the company that made you a part of their team. ... View more

"Our business is learning. Our business is speeding the path of the student to their topic, and helping a professor achieve and drive learning in his/her classroom more easily, more efficiently, and more engagingly," said Chief Administrative Officer Allison Rutledge-Parisi in our introduction to Macmillan Learning video. Across each team at Macmillan Learning, each team, each employee is focused on supporting learning. Every day, our Publishers' Representatives travel to campuses and schools to meet with educators about their courses, challenges, and teaching and learning goals. In this Employee Spotlight, we feature one of these fantastic Publishers' Representatives who spend each day listening, learning, and working to offer solutions so that we can continue our work of improving lives through learning. So, get to know us - and the amazing people who make up Macmillan Learning! Meet Jeff Skillman, Senior Publishers' Representative. Jeff Skillman Senior Publishers’ Representative I work on… the Macmillan Learning sales team as a generalist representative covering the entire list and full suite of learning software. The thing I like best about my current role is… t he problem-solving aspect. I love walking into a professor’s office and helping them solve a problem they didn’t even know they had by switching over to one of our books or online learning platforms. My role contributes to learning and education by… finding a need and filling it—meaning, I consult with professors in order to connect them with the appropriate learning solutions that effectively impact and enhance the learning and performance of their students. I am most excited about the future because… our technologies will continue to improve and the level of service and types of solutions we can provide professors will only get more targeted and effective. A natural byproduct of that will be better student experiences. When I am not working, I am… probably watching a Royals game (on TV or in person) or visiting and trying a new craft brewery. One little known fact about me is… I once held a Top Secret clearance for a summer internship with the FBI back in college. The coolest thing I have seen recently is… 1A) The Royals winning their first World Series in my lifetime and 2B) seeing my first Royals Spring Training game down in Arizona. If a friend asked, I would tell them to join Macmillan Learning because of the… culture. The people I work with make this company such a great place to work. It takes a village to do this job effectively; and, we’ve got a pretty great village here at Macmillan Learning. Jeff Skillman ... View more

Before I began my summer internship at Macmillan Learning, I had never even been in a corporate office, let alone worked for one. I knew there would be some challenges to the new lifestyle, and I was right. Working in the corporate world is certainly no easy task, and it has the potential to cause tremendous strain on our lifestyles. After a long day of meetings and spreadsheets, sometimes a night on the couch seems like the only relief. However, more often than not, spending prolonged time on the couch causes us more harm than good. With the obesity rate in America continuing to rise, it’s very important to instill a healthy lifestyle alongside your professional life. Although this may seem like a daunting task, it is actually much easier than you might think. Below are some healthy lifestyle tips I use in my own life, and they work wonderfully with my busy intern/college student lifestyle! Food 1. Pack your lunch I know we all live busy lives, but spending 10 minutes packing a lunch can make life a whole lot easier, and save you money. In addition, you have control over what you eat the next day (for the most part) and can plan accordingly. 2. Avoid coffee We all love caffeine, but our double shot no foam extra caramel lattes are not helping our healthy lifestyles at all. If you absolutely need coffee, try it black. And if you can live without it, try some natural green tea in the morning. Also, a big glass of water first thing in the morning will give you tons of energy. 3. Healthy snacks There are countless healthy snacks that are easy to pack for work. Pinterest has plenty of ideas, that’s where I get most of mine. My top choice is lightly salted cashews, I carry them everywhere! High in protein and low in calories, they satisfy cravings without making you feel too full. 4. WATER Drink it constantly! Having a water bottle at your desk and/or in your work bag will help you drink more water than limiting yourself to a glass at meal times. Most of the time we’re not even hungry, we’re actually thirsty. And if plain water sounds boring to you, add some fruit and infuse the water. It’s healthy and tasty. 5. NO pop Not only is it high in calories and sugar (even diet pop), it’s absolutely full of chemicals. Water is always the way to go. Physical 1. Gym Membership I know this can be pricey at times, but there are countless discounted options for gym memberships. Well known gyms often have pricing specials running several times a year, especially around the holidays. Countless health sources have talked for years about the endless benefits of working out as little as three times a week, which ultimately makes the price of the membership worth it. So, instead of going home to Netflix and the couch, put on some sneakers and head to the gym. Before you know it, you’ll be feeling so much more energized, and all aspects of your life will start to feel the benefits of exercise. 2. Walking Very simple. Whether it be after work, or during lunch or an afternoon break, walking is easy and has countless health benefits. We often discount it and don’t think of it, but walking is one of the best things you can do for you body. Try and take a break every afternoon, even if it’s just 20 minutes, and walk around the block. You'll come back to your desk feeling much more energized and relaxed, and your body will love it too. 3. Desk exercises Yes, there is such a thing! Pinterest has countless boards of desk exercises, and many of them only take a few minutes to complete. So on your next computer break, take a minute to do some stretches. 4. Medicine Ball chairs These can be a little pricey, but a very good investment. Medicine ball chairs allow us to constantly engage core muscles, which can help with posture and back pain. 5. Standing Desks Standing desks help to alleviate back pain that comes from sitting down all day. They also help us use more energy and burn calories by always being on our feet. Don’t worry, you can lower most of them to seated level at times too. 6. FitBit Challenges Looking for a good way to instill some competition among department members and the company overall? FitBit challenges are a fun and competitive way to make sure everyone gets their daily dose of exercise! Mental 1. Meditation / Yoga Whether you wake up early and do some light mediation before work, attend a yoga class after work, or do some bedtime yoga and stretching in the evening, the physical and mental benefits of yoga and meditation are incredible. Most cities have free, outdoor classes during the summer - check out the offerings near you! 2. Music Listening to relaxing music can really help relieve stress and anxiety, especially at work. I listen to classical and relaxation music almost every day at my desk, especially when I have a lot of work to do. Alleviating stress is a crucial part of good mental health. 3. Read a book Reading a book at the end of the night instead of watching television offers countless health benefits, and can help to alleviate stress and contribute to a good night’s sleep. How are you staying healthy? Share your tips in the comment section below! ... View more

"To help instructors teach better, to help students learn better - all of it is very rewarding," said Senior Vice President, Technology Pratyush Rai in our recent Macmillan Learning video. Across each team at Macmillan learning, every person is laser-focused on that mission in their daily work, including our Learning Solutions group! These folks work every day with educators to provide them with guidance, training, and support when they use our digital tools in the classroom. In this Employee Spotlight, we feature a Learning Solutions Specialist who is just one of an amazing Customer Experience team working to improve lives through learning. So, get to know us - and the amazing people who make up Macmillan Learning! Meet Robyn Burnett, Learning Solutions Specialist. Robyn Burnett Learning Solutions Specialist I work on… providing instructional and pedagogical support for educators in the Life Sciences and Physical Sciences. I also provide digital training and demos for our customers and our sales team. I work specifically on a variety of our best-selling products including Biology(Morris, Phelan, Shuster), Genetics(Pierce, Griffiths), Biochemistry(Berg, Stryer, Lehninger, Tymozcko), Chemistry(Akins, Harris), Astronomy (Comins, Freedman, Slater), Physics(Freedman, Flipitphysics), Environmental Science(Karr, Molles), Nutrition(Pope). Launchpad, Flipit. The thing I like best about my current role is… being a support role for our customers and our sales team. I also provide direct customer feedback to our editorial and product development teams based on what I hear from educators every day. My role contributes to learning and education by… training faculty how to most effectively set up and use the digital tools they will use in the classroom! I am most excited about the future because… educational publishing is evolving all the time, and it’s an exciting time to be here. When I am not working, I am… probably simultaneously watching TV, browsing the Internet, and eating. But I also like running, spending time with my crazy dog, and reading. One little known fact about me is… I used to be a preschool teacher, and I have potty trained 23 children in one year. The coolest thing I have seen recently is… I saw an Instagram celebrity in a Mexican restaurant in Times Square. I also saw Avenue Q that same night. If a friend asked, I would tell them to join Macmillan Learning because of the… fun group of people! Robyn Burnett ... View more

Summer means many things to many different people at all different phases of life. For young children, it means a summer full of sprinklers and popsicles, along with a few scraped knees and sunburns. But for college students, summer means the glorious world of being an intern. The first day of a new internship is always scary, no matter how old we are. For some of us, this year is the first summer we’ve ever had an internship. And to others, this summer is just another summer of working nine-to-five in the corporate world. Sure, we all come into the internships with a relative idea of what we will be doing. At the very least, we know what company we will be working for and in what department. But an internship often comes with countless uncertainties. And if this summer is the first of your interning summers, those uncertainties can be rather daunting. Upon coming to Macmillan Learning this summer for my first internship, I consulted the oracle of Pinterest for tips to completing my first internship, and being an intern that gets remembered in a positive way. After delving through hundreds of tips, I decided on my own top 10 tips, based on my internship experience thus far. 1. Look the part Sure, we all love our yoga pants and sweatshirts, but the corporate world is no place for an outfit made for a night in of Netflix and junk food. If we want to be taken seriously as interns and young professionals, we have to take ourselves and our jobs seriously. Contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t mean we have to break the bank either. When I was preparing for my internship at Macmillan Learning, my mom and I explored my favorite place in the world, Target. Classy and professional clothing on a budget - the perfect place for any college student. Start with the basic, a few pairs of solid colored pants and skirts, maybe a dress of two as well. Then move on to mixing and matching. Grab some patterned tops that can work with several of your pants, and you’ve already created quite a few outfits. Add in a jacket or two with some comfortable shoes, and you’ve got your wardrobe all set, and for a pretty cheap price. Now that the clothes are under control, let’s not forget the appearance. Wake up early and get yourself ready in time for work, and don’t rush. You should feel confident as you strut through Corporate America. You’ll notice everyone else does the same. Also, check out outfits on your commute to and from work. I’ve snagged a few style tips from girls I’ve seen on my commutes. And more often than not, they’re older and have a lot more experience with appearances in the corporate world, so they are a great resource! 2. Be on time (or early) There is nothing more unprofessional than being late, especially on your first day! Always be early, even if you think it’s too early, I promise there’s no such thing. Plan to come into work around fifteen minutes before your boss gets there. This way you can have all of your daily housekeeping tasks (lunch, coffee, etc.) done and you’re ready for your first task of the day when your boss arrives. This also means you’ve got some grace time in case the morning commute doesn’t go well that day. My grandfather always told me that being late wasted someone else’s time, not just my own. So, don’t waste anyone else’s time. I promise, it won’t lead to good things. Also, don’t be the first one out of the office at quitting time either. Again, not the best impression you want to give your superiors. 3. ALWAYS have a good attitude Let’s face it, we’re interns. And as much as your boss can give you some really fun and innovative projects to work on, there are going to be some slow days of mundane “intern tasks.” Whether it be mass mailing, or copying more papers than you thought possible, it’s important to always have a good attitude about any task you’re given. Having a good attitude about the small things makes it much more likely for your boss to assign you another fun project, and who doesn’t want that? 4. Take initiative Getting your tasks done a few hours before they are due is always good, but be sure to make constructive use of the left over time. Start laying the groundwork for a future project your boss discussed with you previously, or complete some easy tasks without your boss even asking you too. Being on top of things will only help make things easier, and make your boss happy as well. It’s a win-win! 5. Listen The main goal of being an intern is to gain experience, and most of that, believe it or not, comes from just listening and paying attention to your surroundings. I know college makes us think that we know everything, but the corporate world boardroom is not the place to be a millennial hot shot. However, sometimes our opinions are warranted and actually might be of help. For example, working in educational publishing, my superiors have often asked me for my opinions of educational products and services in my college career. Helping out like this gives you a chance to share how you feel in a professional and productive manner. 6. Ask questions Contrary to popular belief, your mom was right, there are no stupid questions. Speaking from experience, it is much better to ask a “stupid” question, than to try and complete the task unsure of what you’re doing. And more often than not, mistakes are made when this happens, which will only make you, and possibly your boss, more frustrated. So speak up! Trust me, everyone would prefer you did than try and do things on your own and fail. 7. Get to know everyone From fellow interns to the CEO, it’s important to get to know everyone as best you can while at your internship. First off, it makes the work day a lot better when you’re around people you know. And second, the networking connections you make will be invaluable. While at Macmillan Learning I’ve had the chance to get to know several executives, and even help host a meeting for the CEO himself. And now, he knows me by name and often says hello and starts a conversation with me. When intern orientation came around a few weeks after working here, I was the only intern the CEO knew, and that was a great feeling. Talk about a networking connection! 8. Say yes to new opportunities In the corporate world, not everything is as planned as it may seem. Things often happen last minute, and it’s important to be flexible. From last minute meetings and phone calls, to cocktail parties and work receptions, it’s important to try and attend as many things as you can. Attending events shows your interest in the company and its people, as well as a genuine care for your job. I promise, Netflix will still be there when you get home. 9. Be prepared One of the greatest businessmen I know is my dad. He’s taught me countless business lessons over the years, and taught me the importance of a work ethic and professionalism. One of the key lessons he taught me before I came to Macmillan Learning was to always be prepared. More specifically, always have a pen and paper in your hand. When you come to your boss for an assignment, or when you walk into a meeting, always be prepared to take good notes, you never know where that information might come up again. Come to meetings prepared to discuss the task at hand, and catch yourself up to speed before if needed. There is nothing executives hate more than an intern that is not prepared to do their job. 10. Make a grand exit When the time finally comes for you to clean out your cubicle, be sure you do things the right way. Write thank you notes to your boss and other executives, as well as anyone else that helped you out during your internship. In addition, schedule an exit interview with your boss if possible. Ask about what you did well, and what you can improve on for your next job opportunity. And lastly, stay in touch! Internships are made to turn into job offers, so be sure to keep the company up to speed on your life, and vice versa. It will only help you out when it comes to applying for a job. ... View more

i>clicker, a Macmillan Learning company, today announced the appointment of Renee Altier as General Manager overseeing the i>clicker and REEF Polling companies. Ms. Altier will lead i>clicker ’s product development and growth strategy, reporting to CEO Ken Michaels. “Renee’s industry savvy and boundless energy will be a tremendous asset to the Macmillan Learning team and to the future of i>clicker, said CEO Ken Michaels. “Renee is a seasoned leader with an unflinching focus on our partnership with educators. Throughout her career, she has championed the incubation of learning tools that improve outcomes. We are thrilled to bring her back to Macmillan Learning.” i>clicker is familiar territory for Altier. After Macmillan acquired i>clicker in 2005, she led the team that transformed i>clicker from a prototype into the best-selling student response system in the marketplace. Altier re-joins Macmillan Learning after founding and managing Gateway Interactive Learning, an education consultancy. “I am elated to lead the i>clicker and REEF teams,” stated Ms. Altier. “Both i>clicker and Macmillan Learning have a rich history of bringing customers into the innovation process. With customers as our partners, I have no doubt that we will achieve our collective goal of helping students succeed while providing faculty with easy-to-use tools to support their teaching goals.” i>clicker is an educational technology success story. Created by physicists Timothy Stelzer, Mats Selen, Gary Gladding, and Benny Brown, i>clicker ’s intuitive student response system has been adopted by more than 1,100 higher educational institutions in North America and used by over 3 million students. The i>clicker team recently launched REEF Education, a cloud-based, mobile polling and engagement platform that allows students to participate in class using laptops, smart devices, and/or i>clicker remotes while offering a simple, flexible experience for instructors. Throughout Ms. Altier’s twenty-year career in educational technology and publishing, she has demonstrated the ability to incubate ideas, launch products, build teams, expand market share and improve profitability. Altier will leverage her vast experience to lead the i>clicker team as they develop tools that drive student engagement and outcomes. About i>clicker: i>clicker was built by educators for educators with the goal of keeping students focused on content, not technology. i>clicker is the most widely used student response system in North American higher education, adopted at more than 1,100 institutions and used by more than three million students. i>clicker student response solutions continue to be recognized for superior reliability, intuitive software, and focus on formative assessment and pedagogy. Today, i>clicker is powered by flexibility—giving professors the choice to standardize with one remote, or take a blended approach of mixed mobile and conventional remotes in their classrooms. About Macmillan Learning: Macmillan Learning improves lives through learning. Our legacy of excellence in education continues to inform our approach to developing world-class content with pioneering, interactive tools. Through deep partnership with the world’s best researchers, educators, administrators, and developers, we facilitate teaching and learning opportunities that spark student engagement and improve outcomes. We provide educators with tailored solutions designed to inspire curiosity and measure progress. Our commitment to teaching and discovery upholds our mission to improve lives through learning. To learn more, please visit our website or see us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or join our Macmillan Community. ... View more

"Being a part of this team and sharing their energy and excitement is a privilege," said CEO Ken Michaels in our recent video introducing Macmillan Learning. So continues our series highlighting the creative, remarkable people who make up the Macmillan Learning team. These folks work every day on the content, tools, and services we create for education. Get to know us - and the people who make up this incredible team! Meet Jason Morillo , our Director of Engineering: Process Management! Jason Morillo Director of Engineering: Process Management I work on… the engineering leadership team across the Macmillan Learning offices. The thing I like best about my current role is… the mission and the technology are a very close second, but it’s the people I get to work with. Yes, it sounds cliché but my role revolves around building trust and understanding team dynamics. My role contributes to learning and education by… helping to enable our development teams to build bad a$$ software in an environment where they feel effective, efficient, empowered, and empathetic to our customers. I am most excited about the future because… the expanded width of project initiatives such as readiness and analytics. When I am not working, I am… volunteering at Agile Austin, a large local community of Agile professionals, but most likely I’m spending time with my wife and two kiddos who are currently in and entering Elementary. The boys are in stage right now where just like the bad Aerosmith song, "I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing." One little known fact about me is… I used to judge and compete in custom car and car audio competitions from the mid  90’s to 2003 across the United States. Talk about a bad ROI! It is one of the first things I gave up once I got married. The coolest thing I have seen recently is… the Austin engineering happy hour every Thursday afternoon. If a friend asked, I would tell them to join Macmillan Learning because of the… industry and office culture. Tech Ed is a hot space, we impact lives of students and educators, and if you’re going to work, why not work with folks you like? ... View more

A smartly dressed speaker stands at the front of an auditorium, next to (but not behind!) a podium, grasping a microphone firmly in hand. We all know the scene. Most of us have been that person at the front of the auditorium at least once. No matter how much we cringe at it, public speaking is deeply engrained in our culture. We all do it. It’s a cornerstone of the Western rhetorical tradition, going back to Plato and Aristotle. It’s also changing—and changing rapidly. According to current data from our editorial reviews and marketing surveys, online and “hybrid” courses—courses that have both an online and a face-to-face component—now account for about 20% of all entry-level Public Speaking courses in the United States. It's impossible to overstate how significant that number is. Public Speaking is a media-hungry course. More and more instructors are adopting online assessment, especially speech outlining and video commenting tools. The online and hybrid percentage in this course has nowhere to go but up. In some ways, the Public Speaking course seems particularly ill-suited to the demands of online and hybrid courses. After all, how can a person learn to speak effectively in public when they’re not actually in public? How can a speaker who talks into a laptop camera in her dorm room hope to deliver a speech as impactful as the grandly gesturing podium speaker? Yet despite its apparent limitations, online speaking actually offers several key advantages over face-to-face speaking. It gives the student more options. They can deliver either synchronous (i.e., real-time) or asynchronous (i.e., recorded) speeches. The synchronous method is closer to the traditional face-to-face auditorium setting: the student delivers her speech and streams it to her classmates and instructor online. She can address questions and comments from classmates and from the instructor in real-time, just as she would in a physical classroom. Asynchronous presentations provide greater scheduling flexibility, since not all classmates need to be online at the same time. The student simply records a video of his speech and uploads it to the course site, where classmates and the instructor later add comments and feedback. But this flexibility comes at the price of real-time, back-and-forth communication—a heavy cost, as most instructors consider two-sided communication to be crucial to the public speaking course. That's why many “online” Public Speaking courses still require students to visit campus and deliver speeches to a physical audience once or twice in the semester (see this course at Rochester Community and Technical College for just one example). And of course, 80% of Public Speaking courses are still taught entirely face-to-face. Still, no one can deny the big changes that are taking place in this course. For publishers, these changes are both a challenge and an opportunity, as we pivot to offer new tools for the evolving course. Our Video Tools (available in all Public Speaking LaunchPads) are an important part of the answer, and I’m excited to see what other changes are coming in the next few years. For more of the latest news in Public Speaking and other Communication courses - plus interviews with our authors and much more - don't forget to visit the Communication COMMunity! ​ ... View more

“At Macmillan Learning, there are 800+ highly professional, passionate, altruistic individuals that want to give back to humanity. Being a part of this team is a privilege, ” said CEO Ken Michaels in a recent interview for our Introducing Macmillan Learning video . Over the past several months, I have heard so many colleagues echo similar comments about how remarkable the people and creative energy is at Macmillan Learning. We want to celebrate that! Today we are launching a series to introduce and celebrate the talented people that make up Macmillan Learning. They are smart, creative, collaborative, and fun! Most importantly, they contribute to the content, tools, and services we create for education. Every day, they live our mission of improving lives through learning! So get to know us - and the people who make up this incredible team! First up, Director of Digital Innovation, Alex Britez. Alex Britez Director of Digital Innovation At Macmillan Learning, I work on… guiding our organization through a product design process that places our customer in the forefront.  With my team, we validate problems though customer interviews and test solutions with rapid prototypes in the pursuit of quick learning, iteration, and the reduction of risk. The thing I like best about my role at Macmillan Learning is… curiosity; curiosity about our customers, curiosity about their problems, curiosity about technology, curiosity about the future.  Curiosity leads to questions, and questions lead to learning. This has been an integral part of my growth, both as a developer, designer and just about every other aspect of my life. My role contributes to learning and education by… creating products that balance customer desirability, business value and pedagogical impact.  It is crucial that all three be a focus on all the products that we design for customers. I am most excited about the future because… areas such as personalization, quantified self, wearable technology  and mobile learning, will allow us to tailor individualized experiences where they are both cognitively and physically. When I am not working, I am… either mentoring middle school kids in social impact project based learning competitions and coaching a couple elementary school robotics teams. One little known fact about me is… I could solve a rubik’s cube in a little over a minute. The coolest thing I have seen recently is… how much immersive experiences, such as virtual reality, augmented reality have gain immense traction over the last few years. Not only can we see virtual worlds, but we could also interact with them using our hands and voice. I would tell people to join Macmillan Learning because of the… m ission. With so much disposable media that we are all exposed to on a daily bases, educational technology is in the unique situation where the learning that happens during a student’s experience sticks with them for a life time. ... View more

Education is uniquely human. We must not lose sight of this fact. With rapid technology developments, it’s easy to get swept up in the latest fad—adaptive learning, learning analytics, and iterative content engines, to name a few. Yet sophisticated algorithms never can replace the work of a highly trained instructor. Today’s instructors are domain experts that skillfully know how to distill complex concepts into fundamental learning moments. Too often when I read articles about technology trends in education, I do not see enough mention of the instructor. The instructor (next to the student) is the most influential actor in the learning process. Personalized learning requires personalized delivery from instructors, which is informed by in-depth discipline knowledge, current research, instructional design, and environmental factors. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a technology advocate. I believe data science and adaptive learning tools are extremely valuable. Instructors and universities at large are dealing with a host of complex issues—budget cuts, ballooning enrollments (particularly in general education courses), managing disparate learning levels and styles, and balancing retention rates. Technology is the natural elixir for the ills of the modern classroom. Automatically graded pre-lecture assignments, student response systems, and algorithmic homework questions are all ways to engage students in class as well as provide tailored assignments to large sections. But just as a doctor would not prescribe a cocktail of prescription drugs to a sick patient without a thorough understanding of the patient’s medical history, we should not expect that our teachers will implement a complicated technology system in the classroom without a healthy dose of individual instruction and mentoring. As stakeholders in the education system, we also shouldn’t romanticize a vision of a plug and play learning environment in which teachers and students robotically exchange ideas in bits and bytes. At Macmillan Learning, we believe our deep partnership with faculty is a key driver in understanding teaching and learning challenges and developing the solutions to ease those pain points. Too often, technology that may resonate outside of the classroom doesn’t always address learning challenges within the classroom. It is vital that content and technology are created with learning challenges in mind. A great example is the online homework system, Sapling Learning. Sapling Learning's interactive problems and feedback are designed to help students identify knowledge gaps and provide helpful feedback in real time – just like a personal tutor. The question sets featured in the Sapling system have been exhaustively tested and vetted by subject-matter experts. In fact, a key factor that sets Sapling Learning apart from other online homework systems is our commitment to educator support and platform ease of use. We match educators with a Sapling Learning Client Success Specialist – a Ph.D. or master’s-level subject expert – who provides collaboration, software expertise, and consulting to tailor each course to fit instructional goals and student needs. Our partnership with educators and our obsession with solving education-specific problems are critical to creating tools that work for educators and students. I, along with my talented team, am guided by the ideal that we seek to help teachers and learners thrive and flourish. Technology can be a powerful ally. Yet teachers and students are at the heart of our mission to improve lives through learning. ... View more

Publishing System to Support and Improve Management of Business Processes New York, NY.  Macmillan Learning today announced their partnership with Klopotek, an international software solutions provider, to improve workflow management for the learning science company.  Launch and implementation of Klopotek’s Product, Planning, and Management (PPM) publishing system has already begun at Macmillan Learning with expected progress to continue through 2017. “Developing innovative and timely learning materials for education requires the ability to quickly respond to market needs,” said Macmillan Learning Chief Operating Officer Ken Brooks. “This increasingly complex task spans print and digital materials.  Klopotek provides us an invaluable tool to coordinate development across large, diverse and distributed teams so that we can deliver those materials in a timely, low-cost and rapid manner.” “We are honored and thrilled to have been chosen by this venerable educational solutions company and we welcome Macmillan Learning to the growing family of Klopotek customers,” said George Logan, Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Klopotek’s PPM system, which includes Title Management, Product Marketing, Editorial and Production supplies users with a unified approach to capturing and viewing data, increases transparency between departments, and provides workflow automation. # # # About Macmillan Learning Macmillan Learning improves lives through learning. Our legacy of excellence in education continues to inform our approach to developing world-class content with pioneering, interactive tools. Through deep partnership with the world’s best researchers, educators, administrators, and developers, we facilitate teaching and learning opportunities that spark student engagement and improve outcomes. We provide educators with tailored solutions designed to inspire curiosity and measure progress. Our commitment to teaching and discovery upholds our mission to improve lives through learning. To learn more, please visit http://www.macmillanlearning.com or see us on Facebook , Twitter , or join our Macmillan Community . About Klopotek Klopotek is the leading supplier of software and consulting services for print and online publishers. More than 375 publishers, with over 14,000 users, on four continents, in nine languages rely on Klopotek to help them manage their business and achieve their goals. www.klopotek.com ... View more

Liminal spaces are a hallmark of literature.  The hero walking a path in the woods, treading a narrow line of implied civilization through the wilderness.  A child stepping toward adulthood. Doorways. Carnivals. The boundary between land and sea. These are the places where change happens, where growth occurs, where new life and new potential is realized. We, in publishing, are quite used to liminal spaces. The Harvard Business Review had an article this week about such in-between-ness, though they called it something else.  Hybrid: the new liminal. We, in publishing, are getting pretty used to hybrid too.  And, like HBR points out so eloquently, hybrids aren’t always a pretty thing.  More often, they are a purely functional thing, a physical manifestation of the growing pains of an industry, a concrete expression of the narrow path we are striving to walk between the past – solely print, stable, predictable – and the future we are rushing to meet – one that promises a multitude of media, subscriptions, and, undeniably, more change. I appreciated this article because it celebrates this uncomfortable hybrid space, and I can relate fully to that celebration.  Here at Macmillan Learning, it has been a source of daily enjoyment to imagine solutions for transforming higher education publishing.  There is a post-it note on my computer monitor, a quote from a meeting I sat in during my first couple of years with the company. It repeats a question one of the guests asked us that day: “What does it mean to dominate a failing market?” I wrote it down not because publishing is failing, because it isn’t. What it is, is changing.  And the answer I see to that question is that it is our responsibility, as an industry leader, to direct that change, to ensure that it is for the better, as much as we possibly can. Our CEO, Ken Michaels spoke in Inside Higher Ed last week on the debate between print and electronic media.  Specifically, he said that it doesn’t matter which one is selling better, so long as students are learning.  Just as it doesn’t matter, at least to me, if our hybrids are a little bit inelegant, if our liminal space is a bit more like that battle between surf and sand than it is that smooth step through a doorway.  Because hybrid to me doesn’t mean solution, and it certainly doesn’t mean we’ve arrived out our destination, at the end of the change.  Hybrid means progress, it inspires excitement, it represents the search for something better.  And, as Ken reminded me, it is our focus on students that drives our innovation.  So long as that is at the heart of our work, we will be on the right path. ... View more

Macmillan Learning recently participated in SXSWedu in Austin, Texas, which is an annual ed tech conference that "fosters innovation in learning by hosting a diverse and energetic community of stakeholders from a variety of backgrounds in education."  Over four days, the community comes together in panels, workshops, and interactive sessions to discuss educational challenges as well as the many opportunities to improve in the future. Macmillan Learning sponsored several opportunities to bring this community together to discuss the strategies and tools needed in the future, but perhaps the most thought-provoking was our panel discussing The Science of Learning (podcast can be heard here​) . The panel featured authors Rob Lue and Tyler Cowen debating with Susan Winslow and Editor in Chief of Scientific American, Mariette DiChristina. They discussed and debated how we learn, where we learn, what method of instruction has benefited students the most, what has driven improved outcomes in classrooms, and how all of it has translated to the preparation of our future workforce. They noted that hybrid or "blended" learning has emerged as a teaching method that increases student outcomes while lowering attrition rates. The panelists challenged that combining traditional face-to-face instruction with online learning is not just a skill competency, but an approach that connects to education, leadership, and creativity. They reviewed current research, course experience, and external factors while underscoring that STEM and Liberal Arts education needed a framework to support progress to more effective learning and leadership. Our graphic artist, Stacey Weitzner, also captured the themes and ideas from the session in an Infodoodle (pictured above). Most of the key points from the session are highlighted there and we will be using this as a springboard for continued discussion. It was an incredibly thoughtful, engaging debate that continued in the hallway with the audience for nearly 45 minutes as attendees pulled panelists aside to discuss the themes presented. We want to continue hearing your thoughts! Are we just training drones? Are our teaching methods positively connecting students to learning, leadership, and our future workforce? Is traditional learning meeting teaching/learning goals better than online, or is the hybrid approach best positioning students for the future? Add to the discussion below with thoughts or questions that you want heard. Didn't go to SXSWedu? No problem. The podcast of the session can be heard here​ . The full "infodoodle" is attached here and will also be used to continue our conversation in the weeks and months to come. Join in and let Susan Winslow​, Tyler Cowen​, Robert Lue​ and Mariette DiChristina​ your thoughts on The Science of Learning! ... View more

At the beginning of the New Year, we think about our resolutions, our goals – to ponder whether this is the year to implement a new idea or form a new habit.  I’ve oft-avoided making the leap from the pondering phase to officially committing to New Year’s resolutions because I don’t want to feel bad about not following through.  This year I took a different approach, figuring if I broke a resolution into smaller, quarterly goals (and ditched the word “resolution”), it would be more doable.  But goals of any size still need a structure. I borrowed a philosophy and method from some of the most talented leaders in higher education.  It is a call to action encased in a small book called Scientific Teaching.  It is officially described as a book that “encourages the reader to approach teaching in a way that captures the spirit and rigor of scientific research and to contribute to transforming how students learn science”.  To me it is an elegant and practical primer on teaching and learning, that anyone in any discipline can use to teach better, ultimately resulting in better learning for the student. I learned about this philosophy during a meeting where it was used to help our authors think about how to write their chapters, but what struck me, as a non-educator, was the practical application beyond the classroom.  A section called Building a Teachable Unit: Backward Design provides a simple but profound framework, using backward design (Wiggins and McTighe 1998), to build teaching materials and activities to meet one's learning goals and outcomes.  I took the table for constructing a teachable unit and adjusted it slightly so it could be to build my personal goals.  (See more on a teachable unit in the book.) Now I have a space for committing not only to a goal, but which specific actions will get me there and ways to assess whether I achieved it.  What I am learning is that this doesn’t have to be difficult.  Whether one is starting to do something new in the classroom, perhaps trying out in-class activities for the first time, or crafting personal goals, employing a simple framework that asks us to go beyond just stating the goal, to answer the what and the how, makes it doable. I applied this framework to my goal of writing this blog post: Table 5.3. A framework for constructing a teachable unit. Learning Goals Assessment Activities Alignment What should students know, understand, and be able to do at the end of the unit? Do the learning goals represent the nature of science? How will I determine whether students have met the learning goals? How will students assess their own learning? What activities will engage a diverse group of students in learning? Do the activities and assessments help students achieve the learning goals? Source: Handelsman, Jo, Sarah Miller and Christine Pfund, Scientific Teaching. (New York: W.H. Freeman, 2007) 89. Print. Personal Goal Assessment (i.e. Outcomes) Activities (i.e. Actions + Decisions) Alignment (i.e. Gut Check) What do I want to achieve? How will I measure my success? What do I need to do – and when – in order to meet my goal? Is what I’m doing in alignment with meeting my goal? Write a blog post for Macmillan My post will make it to the site and get read Backward design my post Write a draft by 1/30 Revise on 2/1 If I watch another episode of Mozart in the Jungle, am I going to miss a deadline? It's simple, practical, and brilliant. Ask your local Macmillan rep for a copy of Scientific Teaching or request a copy. How do you approach course design? Share your tips and insights with our community in the comment section below! ... View more

Today at SXSWedu, Macmillan Learning announced the launch of iOLab, a first-of-its-kind handheld tool for college Physics courses that allows students to gather real-time data dynamically. Invented by Mats Selen and Tim Stelzer, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, iOLab allows Physics educators to increase student participation and engagement in class as students are able to see the results of any activity graphed with data in real time. The device communicates wirelessly to its software. Sophisticated built-in sensors give students the ability to measure force, acceleration, velocity, displacement, magnetic field, rotation, light, sound, temperature, pressure and voltages in any field-based or classroom situation. Commenting on the launch, CEO @Ken Michaels said, “This is a quantum leap forward for student engagement in the classroom. The flexibility of this system makes it easy to design or implement virtually any experiment educators want to teach. Classrooms today are struggling with constraints of space and budget. iOLab offers a practical solution coupled with more authentic active learning.” Fully integrated with the Microsoft Office products, a ny user with access to Office 365 can leverage the power of Excel to analyze the information they have captured, and share their data with their instructor, fellow students, or anyone else they choose. To read the full press release, click here. See the product in action and hear from instructors and students here. Share the news on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn! ... View more

Fostering student excitement over research methods was the theme for the day as Discovering the Scientist Within: Research Methods in Psychology authors Gary Lewandowski, Natalie Ciarocco, and David Strohmetz presented their Video Link : 1524 webinar on February 22 nd . The Monmouth University professors focused on making research methods, a key topic for psychology pupils, interesting and appealing for students. Over the course of the semester, Strohmetz stated, students are “learning the concepts, but they don’t feel that they are becoming better researchers.” His advice is to change the way the course is taught and create an enthusiastic environment for students about research. Lewandowski, Strohmetz, and Ciarocco presented with a “show, not tell” mentality, utilizing their time by creating engaging, playful, and entertaining slides coupled with popular culture examples to create an informative lecture.  They aimed to have instructors seek out ways to get their students to think like scientists by inciting their curiosity and relating scenarios to their daily lives on campus. Ciarocco stressed finding research that related back to concepts students would find stimulating. For example, she discussed research on how scent affects behavior, getting students interested about a topic they may not have previously given much thought to. She suggested working in small groups, writing press releases, and having group critiques to hold students’ attention. PowerPoints were a major discussion throughout the webinar.  As avid users of the media, the authors suggested bringing in more visuals and less words, keeping slides neat and uncluttered, and utilizing technology, such as animations and videos, in a smart and deliberate way. The authors emphasized “learning through doing” to root the information in their pupils minds by engaging, rather than just lecturing. The webinar was met with high praise, as many instructors commented on the useful resources brought forward, including teachpsychscience.org​, the professor’s resource site for statistics and research in psychology. There many activities, including group, lab, and one-on-one tools, to use and encourage the class to be curious about the world around them. If you’d like to see the full video of the webinar or the author's PowerPoints, you can do so on the The Psychology Community​. Keep an eye out for upcoming webinars on our Psychology Community! ... View more

The Macmillan Learning team can't wait to head to Austin next week for SXSWedu. We hope to meet and learn more about you while we're there. Here's where we'll be next week at SXSWedu: Tuesday, March 8th, 6-8pm: Startup Showcase​ A networking event that allows attendees to connect with startups in the education space. Tuesday, March 8th,7:30-11pm: Macmillan Learning #MomentumParty​ Keep your SXSWedu momentum going with the Macmillan Learning team at the Speakeasy on Congress Avenue, just a few blocks from the Convention Center. See additional information below. Wednesday, March 9th, 5-6pm: The Science of Learning II panel Susan Winslow, Macmillan Learning Managing Director, will discuss the far-reaching impact of hybrid learning with Macmillan Learning authors Rob Lue and Tyler Cowen and Scientific American Editor in Chief, Mariette DiChristina.  Saturday and Sunday, March 12-13th: SXSW Job Market ​       Engage with our team to learn about careers with Macmillan Learning. We're especially excited about our #MomentumParty on Tuesday night! Here are all the details: Tuesday, March 8th, 7:30-11pm Speakeasy, 412 Congress Avenue Join us for live music (featuring The Nightowls !), bowling, pool tables, free food, and amazing downtown views from the rooftop bar. Be sure to stop in the red lounge to connect with featured Science of Learning II panelists. Our first 100 guests will receive complimentary drink tickets. Door prizes will be given away throughout the evening. We hope to see you next week in Austin! ... View more

Time Magazine recognized Bedford/St. Martin's authors Diana Hacker, Andrea Lunsford,  and Mary Lynn Rampolla, and  Worth author aKathleen Berger among the most-read female authors on college campuses today. The analysis came from 1.1 million syllabi collected in the Open Syllabus Project. The majority of the syllabi come from US campuses, but nearly 30% come from Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. Diana Hacker was honored as the second most widely read female author noting her collection of handbooks have been assigned in close to 4000 classrooms over the past 15 years. Hacker ranks higher than Virginia Woolf, Jane Austin, Toni Morrison, and JK Rowling. Mary Lynn Rampolla ranks in 45th place with her book, A POCKET GUIDE TO WRITING HISTORY, followed by Andrea Lunsford in 62nd place based on use of EVERYDAY WRITER. Kathleen Stassen Berger ranked in 91st place with THE DEVELOPING PERSON series in Psychology. Rampolla was assigned in 688 classes, Lunsford in 529 classes, and Berger in 364 classes according to the TIME rankings. It is a fascinating view into assigned reading material in college classrooms today. More importantly, it is a wonderful testament to these authors and the work they do to support instruction of college students every day. They are improving lives through learning! Congratulations to our wonderful authors and all of the members of the fantastic teams at Bedford/St. Martin's  and Worth Publishers that support them. To see the full list, click here: College Textbooks: 100 Most-Read Female Writers on Campus ... View more

Social media is everywhere, but is that a problem for literacy? Is all the blogging, tweeting, texting, and Facebooking we’re doing leading to a new age of illiteracy—a time when nobody can write more than 140 characters at a stretch and all communication is punctuated with emojis? This much is certain: literacy is evolving. Nowhere is this more evident than in student writing, and noted composition scholar author Andrea A. Lunsford has been doing research on that subject for a long time. In 1986 and 2006, she led two nationwide studies of the problems college instructors are most likely to point out in student work. The data she collected has significantly advanced understanding of what students were and are writing in their first-year composition courses, and she published much-cited articles about these studies with her co-researchers, Bob Connors in 1988 and Karen Lunsford in 2008. She has also spearheaded a longitudinal study, the Stanford Study of Writing. For five years, she and her team followed a group of 189 college writers, asking the students to submit all the writing they did—in class and out—to the study’s archive. The sheer amount of material astonished the researchers, who collected more than 15,000 pieces of writing ranging from coursework to blog posts to vast quantities of poetry. Observing that college-aged writers in the 21st century were writing more than any previous generation ever had, Andrea began to argue that the world was experiencing the greatest “literacy revolution” since the development of writing in ancient Greece.                        New technologies, she has noted, are behind much of this revolution. Writers today can publish with a keystroke, can reach potential audiences all over the world quickly, and can add sound, visuals, and movement to their work. But even more importantly, technology now makes it easy for writing to be collaborative and participatory. The explosion in social media has made young writers ever more aware that they are writing to real audiences who can, and often do, respond. As Clive Thompson has pointed out in Wired, “Lunsford's team [in the Stanford Study of Writing] found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across.” Social and interactive communication can take advantage of actual contexts and engage actual readers to become “writing that makes something happen in the world,” in the words of the Stanford Study participants. It won’t surprise anyone who is familiar with Andrea Lunsford’s work that she remains excited and optimistic about student writing and student writers. Imagine! If social media has had an impact on literacy, it seems to have been a beneficial one. All this, and emojis too.... ... View more

Macmillan Learning announced the appointment of Dr. James Caras as Chief Product Officer. Dr. Caras will leverage his extensive experience as an educator, technologist, and entrepreneur to lead the Macmillan Learning team in the development of engaging and efficient technological solutions for instructors and students in higher education institutions and high schools. Commenting on his appointment, CEO Ken Michaels said, “Jamie’s unique perspective on digital learning resources will elevate our product strategy and will synthesize the efforts of our editorial and technology teams to create more tools designed to meet all instructional needs of courses---from homework solutions to adaptive quizzing and graded essay writing.” To see the full press release, click here. Share the news in your social networks or 'like' the posts on the Macmillan Learning social channels: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN. Congratulations to Jamie! ... View more