Dive Brief:

• Just in time for Educause, Pearson on Monday announced its new REVEL platform, which it says replaces the traditional textbook and provides online learning tools for general studies courses.
• The platform aims to counter the "passive, laborious" materials of the past by engaging students with an interwoven combination of text, interactive exercises, infographics, social features, and videos, additionally allowing educators to track how much time students spend on the material.
• Feedback from over 23,000 educators and students was used when creating REVEL, a process that Pearson said took several years as it incorporated the latest instructional design research and advanced learning and assessment technologies.

Dive Insight:

According to the release, REVEL is already being used at 50 institutions in courses like Introduction to Psychology, Introduction to Sociology, and Public Speaking. It remains to be seen whether the platform succeeds in alleviating professors' woes when it comes to students who show up to class without reading assigned materials, but feedback cited in the release is, as you would expect, positive. We'll have more details on REVEL as our Educause 2014 coverage continues.