digital-learning
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Jolynn Shuler Built a Career at the Point Where Classrooms Meet Markets
Before she led marketing at McGraw Hill, Jolynn Shuler worked the product demos, district conversations and platform sales that make education technology real. Her career is a study in how fluency across functions becomes a leadership advantage.
How a Teacher-Written Curriculum Reached 4.6 Million Students
Great Minds began as an education advocacy group and became a public benefit corporation selling knowledge-rich math, literacy and science programs. Its wager is unusually concrete: give teachers coherent materials, then stay for the difficult work of implementation.
HMH
It started as a Boston book publisher in 1832. Today HMH wants to be the software layer between the test a student takes and the lesson they get next.
Follett Higher Education
The 153-year-old bookseller has become an operating layer for campus life - moving textbooks, hoodies, financial aid and digital access through one unusually broad retail network.
Cengage Group
The company that once filed for bankruptcy owning the textbook now rents you every book it makes for the price of one - and it is quietly rewiring how students, libraries, and job-seekers learn.
Atomi
Atomi is a Sydney-based edtech company that runs an online teaching and learning platform for high school. It pairs short, curriculum-aligned videos with interactive quizzes, AI-driven revision recommendations and real-time analytics, serving students, teachers and schools across Australia and the UK. Founded in 2013 as HSC Hub by Rob Barakat and Thomas O'Donahoo, the company now reaches over a million students and teachers and covers hundreds of subjects across all high school year levels.
Boundless Learning
Boundless Learning is a Boston-headquartered education technology company that designs and manages online degree programs, short courses, and workforce-aligned learning for universities and organizations worldwide. Spun out of Pearson Online Learning Services after private-equity firm Regent LP acquired the unit in 2023, the company builds and operates more than 450 online programs serving roughly 17,000 learners across 150-plus countries, with marquee short-course partnerships including three schools at the University of Oxford. Led by CEO Joshua Richards, it operates in the Online Program Management (OPM) market, handling everything from recruitment and course design to technology and learner support so academic partners can extend their reach online.
Evermed
Evermed is a New York-based health-tech company that helps medical associations and societies turn conference recordings and educational archives into Netflix-style, AI-personalized content libraries. Its software-plus-services model lets organizations launch and operate a branded on-demand education hub in roughly 90 days without expanding staff or wrestling with technology, while unlocking new revenue through subscriptions and industry sponsorships. Founded around 2018-2019 by Bozidar Jovicevic, MD, MBA and co-founder Elia Fedorovski, Evermed powers education libraries used by clinicians in more than 120 countries and partners with major U.S. medical associations including the American College of Cardiology, ACEP, CHEST, CAP and ASA.
Hakan Unsal
Hakan Unsal is the founder and CEO of Primerli, a Los Angeles area edtech company that compresses how an entire industry works into one-hour, entertainment-quality crash courses. A former BCG principal with a Cornell master's and a Columbia PhD, he started Primerli after years of cramming on unfamiliar sectors before client projects convinced him that slide decks are a terrible way to learn. His pitch: professional training should feel less like a lecture and more like a documentary you actually want to finish.
Alastair Adam
Alastair Adam is the co-founder and Co-CEO of FlatWorld, the Boston-based publisher on a mission to bring US college textbook prices back down to earth. A Cambridge-trained lawyer who started in London M&A, he spent two decades advising the information and publishing world before buying the assets of the old Flat World Knowledge in 2016 and rebuilding it. Today FlatWorld's peer-reviewed, low-cost titles are used by faculty at well over 1,500 North American institutions. He also chairs the board of PLOS, the nonprofit open-science publisher.
FlatWorld
FlatWorld is a Boston-based college textbook publisher on a mission to make high-quality course materials affordable for students. Founded in 2007 as Flat World Knowledge by publishing veterans Eric Frank and Jeff Shelstad, it pioneered low-cost, customizable digital textbooks before being acquired and rebranded in 2016 by Alastair Adam and John Eielson. Today FlatWorld offers 145+ peer-reviewed titles across 20+ disciplines, an auto-graded homework system, AI study tools, audiobooks and print-on-demand books - typically priced between roughly $25 and $42, a fraction of traditional textbook costs.
Heather Conklin
Heather Conklin is CEO of Torch, a San Francisco-based digital coaching platform that pairs leaders with expert coaches to drive measurable behavior change at scale. A Salesforce veteran who spent nine years there - culminating as SVP & GM of Trailhead - she joined Torch as COO in 2022 before being elevated to CEO in August 2024. Her philosophy blends behavioral science, data-driven measurement, and the radical idea that vulnerability is a leadership strength, not a weakness.