Bill Tudor, CEO of Tudor Publishing Company, a provider of curriculum planning and assessment software, said providing instructional materials via the Internet will be gradual, but parents will be the first to notice it. Tudor said he is aware of seven major publishers, including the Learning Company, Sylvan and Knowledge Adventure, who are establishing Web-based parental involvement pages in the coming year. Howard Block, principal, Robertson Stephens BankBoston, tracks activities of education companies for mutual funds and investment companies. Block is not seeing lots of small Internet education companies springing up and going for initial public stock offerings. That is still a short time off.
Significant activity involves repositioning established firms to accommodate the Internet market.
Activities of note involve firms such as National Computer Systems and Knowledge Universe buying up smaller firms with Internet capability. The major technology players in education are small supplemental educational software companies, such as Knowledge Adventure. The big question for investors is what the large textbook publishers will do. So far they are building internal technology capacity and adding some technology components, but they are not yet building digital versions of textbooks. The jury will be out for awhile on whether the Internet will transform American education.