Hampshire based ebusiness company, gencon, has just completed the development of an online learning solution for US publisher, Kendall Hunt.
Kendall Hunt is the largest publisher of educational books in the USA. They publish customised books supporting specific academic courses for individual lecturers. The lecturer does not have to pay for the books to be published and earns a royalty on each one sold.
Kendall Hunt were very keen to advance their product offering and cement customer relationships with a distinct technology differentiator when they approached gencon.
gencon designed and built the Virtual Companion (v-companion) for them. This is a distance learning platform which allows the lecturer to go online and write their own interactive courses to support the books published by Kendall Hunt.
Lecturers can prepare course material online with imagery, links and bibliographies. In addition they can assess students progress through assignments covering multiple choice or essay questions.
Students subscribe to a course and complete assignments online. Each companion site records answers given by the students and runs reports on individual and group performance.
"gencon immediately understood that our requirement was not to cannibalise our existing printed materials business but rather complement it" said Dave Clark, Commissioning Editor, Kendall Hunt.
"In the future, it is planned to develop v-companion further into a contact management tool for Kendall Hunt to interact with its clients which will include taking online payments" commented Chris Bourne, gencon's CEO.
