Press Release

Media Contact: Steven Shapiro
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LEARNING OUTCOMES MANAGEMENT DRIVES EMERGING MARKET OPPORTUNITY

Eduventures Research Shows Accountability for Performance Improvement Creating Sector Growth

(Boston, MA) February 5, 2007 - Driven by accountability demands from diverse stakeholders and heightened competitive pressures, higher education institutions increasingly are expected to adopt Learning Outcomes Management (LOM) systems, according to a new research report, entitled The Drive to Learning Outcomes Management. The report, issued by Eduventures, the leading research and consulting firm for the education industry, discusses how higher education institutions are under growing pressure to capture and share their learning outcomes information and data with their stakeholders to enhance accountability and the transparency of institutional performance.

The Learning Outcomes Management market is composed of solutions providers that help colleges and universities develop, deliver, report, and manage assessment-related items and activities. Colleges and universities increasingly are considering these solutions as a way to manage, measure, and document learning outcomes at all levels of the institution. According to the Eduventures report, institutions are seeking to capture outcomes at three levels - Institutional (i.e., broad-based educational impact), Programmatic (i.e., effectiveness of academic programs across large numbers of students), and Student (i.e., performance of a given student against established metrics). Although Eduventures believes that initially this data will be used by internal stakeholders for benchmarking and performance improvement, quality measurements increasingly will be used to demonstrate institutional performance for external stakeholders, such as prospective students, regulatory agencies, accrediting bodies, and donors.

"Our research indicates that institutions' emphasis on using data to improve their management processes will benefit those companies with applications that already manage mission-critical student and institutional data," notes Eduventures' Senior Analyst Catherine Burdt. "These businesses will be in the strongest position to combine the information gathering, analysis, and reporting requirements of both the internal and external stakeholders, and include ERP and LMS suppliers, as well as business intelligence and analytics suppliers." Burdt goes on to include publishers and assessment technology platform providers as examples of other organizations that will benefit from the move to accountability.

The full report, including a detailed analysis of both the institutional model for assessing learning outcomes and the framework for anticipated segment growth in accountability measurement, is available to Eduventures' Industry Solutions clients. For more information on the report and Eduventures' services, please contact Beth Mahon at bmahon@eduventures.com or 617-532-6085.

About Eduventures
For more than a decade, Eduventures has been the most trusted name in the education market for research, consulting services, and peer networking. Its clients include senior administrators and executives from leading educational institutions and companies serving the K-12, higher education, and corporate learning markets, as well as decision-makers in government agencies and the investment community.