MBS expands into online marketplace

Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other online resources have transformed the way students receive information. MBS Textbook Exchange, eying the exodus from print to digital, is evolving to keep up with the technological transformation.
This summer, MBS launched an online social learning platform called Xplana that strives to connect Internet resources in a way that makes learning easier and more interactive for students. The company has since made the case that the new website is the way of the future on college campuses.
“We began looking at the fact that learning was evolving in a lot of different ways,” said Dennis Flanagan, CEO of MBS Direct and Xplana (pronounced ex plah’ nah). “The traditional print book has always been one of the primary sources of learning, with the teacher standing up in front of the classroom. The Internet kind of changed that whole process. You don’t necessarily look in a book to find information.”
MBS, which leads the textbook industry in wholesale production, acquired Xplana last October as a strategic move to keep up with the times, said Rob Reynolds, founder of Xplana.
MBS has about 1,270 workers, which makes it the Columbia area’s second largest private employer behind Boone Hospital Center, so the company’s long-term vitality is important to the local economy.
“We’re very well aware of the move to digital,” Reynolds said. “We have to be ready now and start building that foundation.”
E-textbook sales are expected to grow nearly 50 percent in the next three years, according to the media industry analysis firm Simba Information. Similarly, the market for mobile learning technologies other than traditional computers reached $632 million in 2009, and it is expected to grow 18 percent annually until 2014, according to the U.S. Market for Mobile Learning Products and Services.

Next semester, the University of Missouri System will test-market Xplana. With the pilot program involving five faculty members at three campuses, the company will attempt to measure the effectiveness of the site in an educational setting.
Xplana conducted research with 1,600 students and looked at how they learn and what they would look for in an online learning platform. Xplana found that a large portion of what students do in their studies is unrelated to the actual classroom, Reynolds said.

The students will log on to the website and either start an account or browse as a visitor. A grid of pictures takes up most of the home page. The pictures represent content such as books, videos, websites, notes, images, flashcards and audio. Users can sift through the material by clicking one or more of these categories on the side. Also on the sidebar is a list of academic categories, which grows more specific as users continue clicking.
Users can also create content, join a community, friend other people or send messages. A search bar allows them to find specific items or people. Finally, each person has an album, which contains any material students have added to it.
“We found that universities and colleges spend a lot of money on the formal part of education, but students are pretty much on their own doing the other part,” Reynolds said. “A lot of students get punished accidentally because there’s 50 to 70 percent of their work that they don’t have any help for.”
So Reynolds set out to find helpful content, establish a social learning medium and put it all on one website geared toward student and adult learners alike.
“We can bring a lot of other content to students that is in support of the learning process,” Flanagan said. “Education is evolving into media, not just in the delivery method but in other things that you bring into it. It is audio. It is video. It is websites.”
The UM System’s current learning platform, Blackboard, offers some of the same resources, but Zachary March, MU director of eLearning, said Xplana could work as a supplement.
“Blackboard does what it does very well: rosters, grades,” March said. “It would be a hard tool to replace. What Blackboard lacks is the ability for students to upload material and…to be able to pull [files from multiple sites] together.”
Xplana is breaking into an industry with much competition. In addition to Blackboard, companies such as Desire2Learn, which is used by Columbia College, SunGard Luminis, Datatel Portal, uPortal and PeopleSoft all strive to bring order to organizational and educational chaos.
Xplana is free for students, and the cost for the university would vary depending on the amount and type of advertising allowed, March said.

March was first shown screenshots of Xplana’s developing site in January and said he was “blown away” at the first meeting. The site still has room for improvement, he said, but Xplana has been working with the UM System and making changes based on recommendations.
“It’s very rare that we have the opportunity to make a change to an application as big as this,” March said. “Usually, you get what you get. There’s no adapting of the code. With this one, it’s so new, and they’re seeking our input. It’s very powerful.”
Xplana is about connecting students to content, Reynolds said, which requires finding and uploading tons of it. The site already has a quarter-million types of documents, videos, PDFs, pictures and other files. Reynolds said Xplana hopes to eventually build the world’s largest digital library.
But having lots of content means more than just being able to find helpful material. Flanagan said Xplana could store any and all content created by students in high school and college. This would give users organized access to any of their previous work, which would allow students taking courses in college to access notes they took in Advanced Placement classes in high school.
Reynolds said files in Xplana are easily accessible because documents, as well as the text that identifies other types of media — metadata such as captions and timestamps — are put into XML format. XML, the content format responsible for the x at the end of a .docx file, is compatible with many different devices, such as iPhones, eReaders and computers in general.
“It’s better than my e-mail in the sense that not only do I always keep it, but I can find it,” Reynolds said. “XML can search across all the content, so once I put something in the system, I can’t really lose it.”
March said Xplana is the natural progression of where education is going. “We need to test the water and make sure we can use this, that it improves learning and improves teaching,” he said. “This could be a game changer if they could make it work.”