Rapid adoption by students and faculty attests to value of innovative tools that drive student engagement and improve learning outcomes
SAN CARLOS, CA, May 3, 2007—Aplia, an online homework system designed to improve learning by increasing student effort and engagement, registered its 500,000th user during the spring 2007 semester. This milestone underscores the strong demand among educators for innovative learning solutions that improve student performance and interaction in their courses.
Created by economist and Stanford professor Paul Romer, Aplia provides instructors with the ability to deliver interactive, auto-graded assignments, ensuring that students put forth quality effort on a regular basis. Aplia has four different types of content, including problem sets with detailed feedback, timely news analyses, real-time experiments, and tutorials that help students overcome deficiencies in prerequisite material. These assignments have been developed for a range of textbooks, are easily customized for individual teaching schedules, and include several cost-effective purchasing options.
"We began Aplia with a strong vision of helping students learn by encouraging them to put forth more effort and really engage themselves in their coursework," said Nicholas Smith, president of Aplia. "It's been amazing to watch students thrive using our economics material, and it will be even more exciting to see Aplia's successful model evolve as we branch into other disciplines."
Aplia first developed materials for economics courses in 2002, and has since expanded its offerings into finance. Aplia's recent acquisition by Thomson Learning has helped to accelerate growth past the 500,000-student milestone, while giving Aplia the opportunity to expand into additional disciplines such as statistics.
About Thomson Learning
Thomson Learning delivers highly customized learning solutions for colleges, universities, professors, students, reference centers, government agencies, corporations and professionals around the world. These solutions are delivered through specialized content, applications and services that foster academic excellence and professional development, as well as provide measurable learning outcomes to its customers. Thomson Learning's mission is to shape the future of global learning by delivering consistently better learning solutions for learners, instructors and institutions.
About Aplia Inc.
Founded in 2000 by renowned economist Paul Romer, Aplia Inc. is built upon the premise that "student effort is the key determinant in student success." Aplia is a collection of Web-based tools that enables professors to easily incorporate two key teaching elements: frequent online homework that is automatically tracked and graded and active learning such as experiments and current events. The result is better-prepared students, more effective use of class time, enhanced discussions, and more in-depth learning. Aplia is headquartered in San Carlos, California.
CONTACTS:
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Susan Prager Marketing Manager 650-413-6678 sprager@aplia.com |
Adam Gaber Vice President, Corporate Communications 203-539-8663 adam.gaber@thomson.com |