Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Goes LMS with New HMH Player

DJ LMS: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) has ventured into the LMS world. Touting Google and Knewton as partners in the development process, HMH debuted its new HMH Player, available for iOS and Google Chrome, at ISTE.

The HMH Player brings together content, assessment, and discussion on one central platform, with both teacher and student versions. Designed with three quality goals in mind (“engagement, simplicity, and flexibility,” according to Paul Murphy, Vice President of New Markets Studio at HMH), the player allows teachers to drag and drop content into lessons to push out to students. Other features include a “Collaborative Classroom” function, a discussion board where students can ask teachers questions and get an immediate response, among other things.

In addition to advising on native functionalities with devices, “Google helped us iterate on the product,” Murphy explained. And Knewton is helping to design a predictive analytics element for the HMH Player platform, likely to be available in October, according to Murphy.

HMH’s math curriculum GO Math and its Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra II High School Math series (HMH AGA) are the first programs to integrate with the HMH Player. English language arts tools are planned for release in 2015.

Editor's Note: Following the publishing of this write-up, Emma Doherty, HMH Director of Corporate Communications, followed up with EdSurge regarding this update being referred to as an LMS: "We see the app creating a new category — because it blends functionality from disparate solutions such as LMSs, collaboration tools, assessment offerings, and brings them all together in one application. Distinct from an LMS, it also functions online and offline – which is a key challenge for current industry offerings. Because the Player sits outside a local installation of an LMS, it can go beyond current limitations of LMS offerings, especially the dependency of many to be in a connected state in order to access content."