As I understand it was a straight buy-out and Babble wanted to take advantage of the tens of thousands of people who were members of FriendsAbroad.

It terms of LiveMocha and Persons it will be interesting to watch which side benefits most. If you are Pearson you gotta be worried about all those titles that will be threatened in a non-book (or free book), services centric world.

There is no reason that the same thing that happened to music and is now happening to movies and newspapers couldn’t happen to the ELT publishing industry. It sounds to me like Pearson has placed bets on a changing market place- from servicing schools to servicing students directly. I see this as a switch from an institution-centric model to a student-centric model.

When a book provider aligns themselves with an company like Livemocha, schools (by way of bookstores), currently the main customers of Pearsons, will ultimately suffer in the end. Cue the “end of the dinosaurs era” music.

I would have loved to have rewritten the press release for this announcement. Mine would have gone something like this:

Pearsons sides with On-line provider, language schools under threat. Are teachers next?

It seems to me like a good content partner can support schools, or teachers or students but it is stretching it a bit to believe that you can fully and strategically support any two at the same time.

So, who is you know who going to end up supporting most, teachers or students?

@China_Mike I already thought they did because of the entry screen of friendsabroad. Interesting.

While I haven’t heard anything about Edufire and TeachStreet merging , our partnership is fun and fruitful. Most of all, we love working with great leaders in the education space and we appreciate learning from them.

Cheers,

Katie Gruver
Community Manager, TeachStreet

I love TeachStreet and eduFire. There are some definite possibilities for collaboration in the future. Jon and Dave are both great guys, and I’m really looking forward to watching both TeachStreet and eduFire grow.

Thanks for the post.