As creativeLIVE’s user base grows, it needs additional capacity to film more courses, said CEO Mika Salmi. Since its launch in April 2010, the company said its students have surpassed a total of 12.5 million learning hours and top one million learning hours per month.

Despite growing competition in online education — from veteran companies like lynda.com to newer entrants like Udemy — Salmi said it’s increasingly attracting students with its high production quality and live online broadcasts.

“It’s not just about telling you what to do, it’s about people in the classroom attempting to do what the teacher is doing,” he said. “It’s a real-time event.”

Unlike other companies targeting lifelong learners, creativeLIVE doesn’t just offer pre-taped video courses. Users can purchase recorded courses but watch frequent live broadcasts of classes on everything from software development to filmmaking for free. Salmi said that the average live class receives 30,000 unique viewers and while he declined to share how popular the paid courses are, he said that the company has paid out a total of $3.5 million to the more than 100 instructors who teach 250 different courses on the site.

The company was launched in 2010 by photographer Chase Jarvis and entrepreneur Craig Swanson but mostly operated under the radar until last year, when it announced a $7.5 million round of financing from Greylock and others and added Salmi, formerly the president of Viacom Digital, as CEO. (It later raised a smaller amount from Hollywood talent giants Creative Artists Agency and William Morris Endeavor, as well as Google Ventures and Crunchfund.) Now that it’s making a bigger push in a crowded field of online education, it makes sense that the company wants to maintain a bigger presence in Silicon Valley, where it can be closer to potential teachers for its classes and talent to help the startup grow.

For now, the company’s audience is mostly U.S.-based, although Salmi said that its most successful broadcasts get viewers from around the world. But it has aspirations for cultivating an even more global audience. Given its focus on live broadcasts, it would make sense for the company to open up studios in different time zones. But Salmi declined to comment on future plans regarding new studios, saying only that viewers tune in at all different times of the day and night to watch its broadcasts and that it’s exploring different products that would enable the company to reach a global market on a real-time basis.

When it launched about two years ago, the company, which is led by Zynga co-founder Steve Schoettler, planned to bring software to teachers and schools that gave them a data-rich picture of student progress. But last fall, after losing a few founding members and encountering some unexpected obstacles, the company announced a change in strategy. On Monday, the startup rolled out its first product since its pivot: a service for helping publishers and ed tech companies better understand the education market.

“We changed the product strategy but the mission is the same,” said Schoettler. “For the first time, publishers can understand the schools they’re selling to.”

Called EdLights, the product is a departure from Junyo’s initial vision, which involved using analytics to help schools understand and adapt to how students learn. But it’s still a data play: it pulls together a wide range of datasets — including school performance data from each state, funding data and census data — to give publishers a way to understand the specific needs of the more than 103,000 schools in the country.

For example, a company with a literacy product specifically for English language learners could use EdLights to filter for schools and districts that not only have a high percentage of Spanish-speaking students, but that have also received relevant federal funding and have under-performing students.

The primary audience is publishers and ed tech companies – from giant players like Pearson to smaller startups that want a leg up in selling to schools. But, while it’s not actively selling to schools, the company said other educational organizations could also benefit from the data.  For example, it could help schools benchmark themselves against schools in other areas with similar demographic and performance profiles or enable state departments of education to do A/B testing to determine the effectiveness of various education products or resources, the company said.

In the past year or so, data has become a beloved buzzword in education as new startups — like Clever and Learnsprout – as well as big operations — like the Gates Foundation-backed InBloom initiative – have touted their plans for freeing up and sharing all kinds of student information. But Junyo’s approach differs from most other data-focused ed tech startups.

The company intends to offer various packages for customers including a $79-per-month subscription package and a $4,000-per-year enterprise product. And, potentially to reassure potential customers wary of a newly-pivoted company, Schoettler said he estimates that with its new model, the company will be profitable by next year.

Since launching in 2008, the adaptive learning company, which takes a data-driven approach to personalizing learning, has partnered with less than a handful of other publishers, including Pearson, Wiley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Its latest partnership shows that its not only making headway in the domestic K-12 and higher education markets, but that it’s extending its reach overseas and among markets that have been slower to go digital.

“Today, ELT [English Language Teaching] is all offline,” said David Liu, Knewton’s COO. “[Macmillian is] creating content for the digital experience from scratch — not only the educational content, but the assessment content.”

Over time, Liu said, the partnership will extend to other Macmillan content, not just that for ELT. But, to start, Macmillan will build on Knewton’s adaptive learning platform to provide personalized grammar and vocabulary lessons, exam reviews and other kinds of content to ELT classrooms, as well as individuals, across 120 countries.

In the increasingly hot adaptive learning space, Knewton isn’t the only game in town. Dreambox Learning, McGraw-Hill and Cerego are a few other companies pitching various approaches to customized digital learning experiences for K-12 students, colleges and individual learners.

While Knewton offers some evidence of its success – in a 2011 program of 2,000 remedial math students at Arizona State University, the company said, withdrawal rates dropped by 56 percent and pass rates climbed 11 percent – it’s still early days for adaptive learning and some learning experts say more proof is still needed.  Still, Knewton is growing steadily. By the end of last year, the company, which has raised $54 million, reached about 500,000 and it expects to reach 5 million students by the end of this year.

On Wednesday, Chegg, which now bills itself as an online “student hub,” said that it is partnering with ed tech darling du jour, Coursera, to provide digital content, including textbooks and other materials, to students enrolled in its massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Through the partnership, Coursera students will be able to purchase Chegg material, as well as receive some publisher content for free. They will also be able to make use of other Chegg features, including Q&A forums, search and highlight options. Coursera students could still purchase content from other sources, but the company said it offers lower prices than other vendors and students wouldn’t benefit from the social options connected to Chegg content.

The companies declined to share financial details of the deal. And, when asked whether similar partnerships with other MOOC providers edX and Udacity might be on the horizon, CEO Dan Rosenweig said, “Our vision is to become the leading connected learning platform… We’re not going to limit ourselves to anything.”

MOOC providers have faced more vocal challengers in recent months, but this deal underscores their steadily growing influence. Even if their completion rates hover around just 10 percent, Chegg clearly wants to be able to get in front of the millions of learning-focused eyeballs that are being drawn to Coursera.

Until now, Coursera professors have only been able to require supplemental content that is available for free on the web and recommend textbooks. Chegg said it will enable the MOOC provider to make some publisher-created content available for free during the course. Students will then have the option to purchase the full eTextbook from Chegg for continued learning after the course.

As of the partnership’s launch, just two courses will offer Chegg content but, over the next few months, the companies said it will expand to several dozen of the site’s 370 courses.

Last spring, the Boston-based startup said it had raised $8 million in venture funding just as Pearson, Cengage and Macmillan Higher Education slapped it with a lawsuit alleging several violations, including copyright infringement, unfair competition and false advertising. Boundless curates and packages free online content into open textbook alternatives tailored to students’ learning needs.

In June, the startup filed a motion to dismiss a few of the claims and said the other claims were without merit. But last month, a U.S. District Court Judge in New York denied the motion to dismiss.

Undeterred, Boundless this week filed another response, requesting a trial by jury.

“In our view, such legal action [by the publishers] is an attempt to stifle startups such as Boundless who are driving innovation and using the power of the Internet to help students save money and become better learners,” Boundless CEO and founder Ariel Diaz said in a statement.

Pearson, Cengage and Macmillan Higher Education did not immediately reply to requests for comment. But in their complaint, the publishers allege that Boundless “steals the creative expression of others, willfully and blatantly violating Plaintiffs’ intellectual property rights in several of their highest profile signature textbooks.” Specifically, they say that Boundless copies “the distinctive selection, arrangement and presentation of Plaintiffs’ textbooks, along with other original text, imagery and protected expression.”

In its defense, Boundless argues that the allegations are “overly broad and legally flawed” and that the similarities between the publishers’ textbooks and their online content are the result of covering the same facts and concepts in an order necessitated by the subject matter.

Despite the legal battle, the startup has pushed on, adding more content, organizing content hackathons and releasing its content under Creative Commons. Boundless currently offers content for 18 subjects and claims that students at half of the colleges in the country use its content.

Momentum behind open educational resources is growing – California and British Columbia have backed open textbook initiatives, for example.  And as awareness and the amount of low-cost or free open educational resources grows, services, like Boundless, could help professors, students and others sift through, curate and organize it. CK-12, a non-profit that curates high quality STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) content, takes another approach to aggregating and distributing open educational content. But this ongoing legal battle highlights how disruptive this movement could be to the textbook industry.

“You should be able to update content in the digital world on the fly,” he said. “In digital, the idea of a new textbook edition doesn’t exist any more.”

Since launching in 2009, the digital textbook startup has worked with about 80 publishers to bring more than 200,000 higher education and K-12 titles to all kinds of mobile and connected devices. On Tuesday, it unveiled Advance, a new free platform that lets publishers and authors turn static files or PDFs into an interactive book “in minutes.”

If schools are going to embrace digital content, Rashid says, they need to know that they can find all of the titles they need in digital form, not just a handful of them. With Advance, the company, which competes with giants like Amazon (a AMZN) and Apple and startups like Inkling and Benchprep, hopes it’s found a way to get more content onto its platform.  The platform itself is free, but Kno takes a cut of each book purchased.

To use the platform, publishers submit flat files to Kno, which the company says it can turn into an interactive format in minutes. From there, publishers can update content and add video, audio or other interactive components whenever they want. Publishers can also add end of chapter questions or other assessments, which can be captured and analyzed in Kno Me, the analytics dashboard launched last month.

While Apple’s iBooks similarly lets authors create interactive ebooks, the final product can only be accessed on iOS devices. Publishers on Advance can use the platform to create content for iOS, Android, Windows 7 and 8 and the browser.

Kno, which has raised about $69 million from top Silicon Valley VCs like Andreeseen Horowitz and SV Angel, said some of the publishers using the new platform include McGraw-Hill Education and Wayside Publishing.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the education-focused division of the McGraw-Hill Companies unveiled the SmartBook, an adaptive ebook that adjusts the reading experience to each student’s pace and mastery level.

Content is still structured somewhat like a textbook but instead of asking students to read it thoroughly from start to finish, it coaches the student on how to read the material and quizzes them on various concepts as they move through each section. Depending on their responses, they’re guided along to different highlighted passages. McGraw-Hill said it expects to release SmartBooks at prices starting at $19.99 for about 90 courses later this Spring.

The program, which is available on computers and tablets, builds on the 12 billion data points on student learning collected from LearnSmart, McGraw-Hill’s adaptive learning platform, the company said. But where LearnSmart is more focused on reviewing material, SmartBook attempts to help students read more efficiently to better retain information.

“To revolutionize learning, you need to revolutionize reading,” said Brian Kibby, president of McGraw-Hill Education. “We’re focused on attacking graduation rates and getting results.”

From a demo, it does seem that the SmartBook aims to provide an adaptive reading experience that adjusts to students with a good deal of granularity, using dynamic text and voice instructions to literally talk them through the program and point out the areas on which they should focus.  But McGraw-Hill’s products are not the only adaptive learning platforms out there. A year ago, at CES, for example, publishing giant Pearson announced that adaptive learning company Knewton would power its digital offerings. Macmillan also offers an adaptive assessment tool in its PrepU program.

The program closely tracks student behavior and, according to the Wall Street Journal, the company may share that data with instructors to improve courses, which could raise privacy questions for students and parents. But the company has said that it takes data protection seriously.

With increasing options for digital content, including open content and self-authoring platforms, McGraw-Hill Education and other textbook publishers are attempting to set themselves apart with products that make textbooks more interactive and smarter. The digital textbook market is still a small piece of the overall textbook universe but it’s expected to become a driver of growth. Kibby has been especially bullish on digital textbooks, arguing that higher education should go totally digital by 2015.

In November, McGraw-Hill announced that it planned to sell its education arm to private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $2.5 billion, but the deal has not yet closed.

In a conversation at the SIIA Ed Tech Business Forum, Luyen Chou, chief product officer for Pearson’s K-12 technology group, said that as new technology upends the textbook publishing industry, his company needs to become an “Electronic Arts for education.”

Clearly, Pearson and its rivals in education publishing need to reimagine their role as the rise of digital content cripples their business model. But look to Electronic Arts as a model?

Speaking with me later, Chou said that to keep up with the changing environment, traditional publishers can’t just digitize the static textbooks of the past, they need to excel at producing high-quality, interactive digital learning experiences and get them into the hands of students.

“[That includes] digital studios, animators, illustrators, producers, 3-D artists – we need to build that capacity within instructional companies like Pearson and we need the whole end-to-end supply chain to the take that from the studio to the actual users,” he said. “The folks that have done that well are the EAs of the world, digital studios. That’s not a core competency for companies like Pearson.”

Given the company’s wide reach across different corners of the market, from content to testing, at the K-12 and college levels and beyond, one of Pearson’s key assets is the massive amount of data it can use to target and personalize learning for students. And Chou acknowledged that the Electronic Arts parallel wasn’t meant to imply that Pearson only needs to focus on creating high-quality content, and not on other parts of its business.

“I take it for granted that we’re going to have a huge strategic advantage by way of the data we have on our customers, our students,” he said. “But you still have to serve up those compelling experiences. You can have the best data and the best algorithms in the world, but if what it ends up serving up is digitized versions of 2-D static content, it’s not going to sell either. We have to make sure that we’re complementing our data and platform with high-quality interactive learning content.” In getting to that goal, he said, it’s an open question whether the company will build or buy.

Interestingly, the SIIA ed tech conference itself took place at the McGraw-Hill Conference Center   in New York and several speakers commented on yesterday’s news that the publishing giant had sold off its education division to private equity firm Apollo Global Management.

But while McGraw-Hill chose to divest itself of its education arm, Pearson has taken the opposite approach, arming itself with even more education companies in recent years.

In the last twelve months alone, the company has spent $1.6 billion on acquisitions, according to Baran Rosen, president of media investment bank Whitestone Communications. And, given reports that Pearson is exploring the sale of the Financial Times, its push in education will likely only continue.

“They are going to really be a pure-play education company,” Rosen said at the SIIA conference. “That’s where they’re staking their future and they’re doing it in a big way.”

Image by Cindy Minear via Shutterstock.

The news wasn’t surprising as the company said in September 2011 that it planned to split its more profitable financial services division from its education arm. And earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and others reported that a deal with Apollo was in the works. According to McGraw-Hill, the deal is expected to close in late 2012 or early 2013.

As the rise of digital content disrupts the publishing business, McGraw-Hill Education has attempted to keep pace with new products like its adaptive learning platform LearnSmart and partnerships with digital distributors like Apple, as well as startups Kno, Benchprep and others. Despite its efforts, the company’s education unit has lagged behind its financial services division. In the last quarter, for example, revenue for the unit fell 11 percent to $836 million. In its quarterly report, the company said the growth in sales of digital products across all product lines and the migration to more subscription-based business models impacted revenue.

Wall Street responded favorably to the news – after the announcement of the sale, shares in McGraw-Hill climbed about 2.35 percent to $52.90. Once the deal is closed, McGraw-Hill will be renamed McGraw Hill Financial.

As Bloomberg notes, McGraw-Hill Education’s sale isn’t the first time private equity has dabbled in education. In 2007, London-based Apax Partners led a $7.75 billion purchase of Cengage Learning Inc. from Thompson Reuters Corp, the financial news outlet reported.

As we and others have reported, tablets and other digital devices, along with the growth in open content initiatives and other textbook creation tools, are dramatically changing the landscape for traditional textbook publishers.

This summer, in a conversation with reporters, Jay Chakrapani, vice president and general manager of digital at McGraw-Hill Higher Education, said that the company wants to be the “Netflix of education.”

Through its digital products, LearnSmart, especially, he said, the company gathers increasing data about its students, enabling them to personalize learning experiences much like Netflix personalizes recommendations over time. Going forward, it will be interesting to see if Apollo takes a similar view on the future of McGraw-Hill Education.

Given the size of the K-12 textbook market — $8 billion, as my colleague Laura Owen pointed out in a post on digital textbooks earlier this year — the opportunity is certainly there. But, considering that the procurement processes are largely controlled by state governments and school districts (and can often involve a decent amount of bureaucracy and red tape), it can be a difficult field to break in to.

To get around that hurdle, Kno isn’t targeting the schools themselves, but the parents.

“While the schools figure out what they want to do with their strategy… we believe that we can make this available to parents,” said Osman Rashid, CEO and co-founder of Kno, Inc.

The company’s pitch is that, for $9.99 or less, parents can rent an interactive, searchable textbook for a year and, at the very least, save their kids from having to carry a 25-lb. backpack to and from school every day. The books, which span several subjects, such as chemistry, English and biology, include links to videos, audio files, images and 3D models. They also come with digital flash cards and quizzes, as well as a journal that stores all of a student’s notes and highlighted content, which they can review even after the yearly rental expires.

Students can also write on the books and type notes (although functionality is limited with the current tablet keyboards and finger-based writing options).  In the coming months, the company plans to roll out an analytics feature that tracks student engagement, which the company said can be a leading indicator of student mastery and performance.

In January, Apple announced its own entrance into the K-12 market with an iPad-based textbook initiative launched in partnership with HMH, Pearson and McGraw-Hill. And, given its longstanding relationship with the K-12 market and the speed with which schools around the country have adopted the iPad, the tech giant has a built-in advantage.

But, for his part, Rashid said: “Apple being in the market is awesome. Ever since they’ve entered, I’ve never had to explain what a digital textbook is. As a startup, I’m saving a lot of my marketing dollars.”

Aside from Kno’s price (which is lower than Apple’s price of $14.99 or less), he said that his company aims to offer a deeper educational experience, the ability to access the books on multiple platforms (not just the iPad, but the Web, Android and Windows 7) and a larger catalog of books.

Through its partnership with HMH, Rashid said they cover about 48 percent of the market with a K-12 curriculum based on the Common Core standards, which have been adopted by 45 states. He said they already partner with Pearson and McGraw-Hill for their college offerings and hope to bring them over to the K-12 market as well.

As for its penetration in the higher education market, Kno said it offers 250,000 textbooks and journals in partnership with nearly 60 publishers and reaches students at about 5,500 universities and colleges.