Upper Saddle River, NJ (USA)/Oslo (NO), February 2009 - Pearson, an international education and information company, has announced an agreement to acquire Fronter, a European onlineLearning company, from its co-founders Roger Larsen and Bjarne Hadland and other private investors, including employees of the company.
Founded in Oslo in 1998, Fronter has built a learning platform that provides easy-to-use tools for secure online education and collaboration. The Fronter platform enables students to learn whenever and wherever they choose; review their personal study plan; submit assignments; communicate with teachers, peers and parents; and study on their own or in a group.
Teachers use the platform to create, store, and repurpose learning resources and coursework that their students access online. The platform includes more than eighty tools for teachers and students and is highly customisable in terms of functionality, design, and language.
The acquisition by Pearson pushes the platform into the big time, as the winners in the VLE market tend to be those with sales and marketing clout and global reach. But it won't be easy. In the UK, Fronter has proof of concept with the London Grid for Learning, but London is not often the catalyst for the rest of the UK market.
Fronter has offices in ten countries and more than 3,000 educational customers, serving a total of four million users. It has strong market positions in countries that have been early adopters of online learning-management systems, including Norway, Sweden and the UK. It has grown revenues at a compound annual rate of fifty percent since 2005 and enjoys subscription renewal rates of well over ninety percent. The company had gross assets of £6.6m at the end of June 2008.
While LMSs can demonstrably revolutionize learning in schools, extending the business certainly won't be smooth sailing. The market is fragmented, there are dozens of vendors, and sales are often made at the level of the individual school, where the cost of sale is high and budgets low. Once bought, schools rarely have the project management skills to implement these systems efficiently, and there's fierce resistance from more traditional teachers.
Pearson expects the acquisition to strengthen both its own education business and Fronter by providing both companies' customers with a wider range of services; by enabling Fronter to expand into new geographic markets; and by supporting the growth of Pearson's education technologies globally.
John Fallon, chief executive of Pearson's International Education company, says: "Fronter is a highly successful company that has done particularly well in Scandinavia and the UK. We know there is great demand for this kind of flexible, digital, and educationally-effective service, and we believe that Pearson's scale, international reach, and broad educational capabilities can help Fronter achieve its global ambitions. Together we will play an ever-more-effective role in harnessing technology to personalize learning and enhance student performance."
