Oxford University Press (OUP), the world’s largest university press is betting big on Oxford Educate, a digital aid for students, for increasing its business in India.
Oxford Educate integrates an e-book with interactive teaching tools and learning materials.
Ranjan Kaul, Managing Director of OUP India said, “Oxford Educate proves to be an advantage for teachers since it can run on a smart mode and also be shown on a projector. It is an exciting digital teaching aid integrating interactive e-books which include animations, audio and video clips, slideshows and other multimedia content for all key OUP school courses.”
Launched in February this year, it comes with a Test Generator, an assessment tool designed to benefit teachers by enabling them to create a variety of test papers. Oxford Educate is provided free of cost to schools using the OUP course books.
This digital aid incorporates a variety of resources: interactive animations, videos, poem and prose animations and audios for English Language Training (ELT) courses, instructional slide shows, lesson plans, answer keys, additional worksheets, and image references among others.
Kaul explained that when it is used in conjunction with the embedded tools available in the Oxford Educate platform, it will enable teachers to enrich and supplement teaching-learning in the classroom.
Presently, there are about 11,000 schools in India which use the printed and digital course material of OUP, which completed its 100 years of operations in India in 2012. While Kaul explained that they would envisage all these schools to use Oxford Educate in the future, OUP is looking to tap atleast 20% of the schools to use this resource.
Since OUP also has presence in smaller towns where there is a paucity of qualified teachers, Kaul opined that the response from smaller towns for this digital aid has been much better.
Apart from this digital aid, OUP is looking to expand in India by globalisation of academic content.
“We are looking at sharing research between countries including India, so that academic research is more widespread,” said Kaul.
Though OUP has books across all education levels, Kaul informed that there is not many publications available for Grades 9-10. In the coming years, OUP is looking to expand its course material and assessment offerings in these grades in both print and online format.
Keeping in tune with the increase in digitisation of books, Kaul also said that OUP is currently making preparations of offering books that are in demand in a digital format.
One of the oldest English language encyclopedia -- Encyclopedia Britannica — has now been completely digitised. The company publishing this encyclopedia had decided in 2012 that it will not print any more editions of it and will offer it online.
