Russian online education platform ‘Azbuka’ will soon offer customers access to electronic textbooks from global publishing firm Pearson. Based in London, Pearson is the world’s largest educational publisher, with its textbooks used by more than 100 million people worldwide.
Azbuka (meaning alphabet, or ABC) is a Russian online educational service which offers access to electronic textbooks and additional educational content through its own digital rights management (DRM) technology.
The key idea behind Azbuka is that high quality education should be accessible to anyone, regardless of their social circumstances or where they live. Although customers have to pay for content, Azbuka’s creators say the key to its ‘accessibility’ lies in the fact that electronic textbooks cost less than printed ones. Furthermore, students can access electronic textbooks wherever there is internet, instead of having to wait for them to be delivered to schools.
“Global educational corporation Pearson has been operating in Russia since 1996 and its learning materials have been hugely popular amongst teachers ever since, satisfying the considerable demand from those studying English. We hope that our collaboration with Azbuka will be useful to those who are interested in successful online language learning,” commented Oleg Khamdamov, Head of Pearson’s Russian department.
“Pearson is a world leader in the educational content market. Working with this global company represents a great victory for our resident company and is a testament to the high quality of the services it offers. We believe that this collaboration will help Azbuka become a market leader both in Russia and globally,” said Ekaterina Gaika, Deputy Director of the IT Cluster at Skolkovo, the international tech hub under completion on the outskirts of Moscow.
Source: RusBase.vc
