IMS Global: eCollege is a name that most college and university administrators are familiar with, but like a lot of services, their knowledge may be a little vague beyond their initial perceptions. What little-known facts would you like people to know about eCollege? And what differentiates your services from other providers?

MS: eCollege really is the national leader for comprehensive, eLearning technology and services to education. We're a one-stop shop, if you will, for institutions that want to provide top-notch online education services for their students. With eCollege's approach, schools can focus on what they do best-education-and not worry about the logistics and technical aspects of handling the online delivery.

We were founded in 1996 and we've always been very focused on supporting 100 percent online learning, with all of the education happening at a distance. That's why we've developed our product suite in a way that really drives scale and efficiencies in managing fully online programs. Our approach also really extracts a tremendous amount of useful data in order for both ourselves and the institutions we serve to understand what is happening in online programs. Gathering information in detail allows an institution to really look at the financials of the programs-how can they get more enrollments in a course while maintaining quality? How can they ensure the success of learning outcomes and also drive retention? And that's really a key difference between eCollege and other CMS providers.

In addition, it's a lot easier to apply the fully online solution campus-wide, rather than trying to use the supplemental products for distance learning.

Also, for our customers, our comprehensive approach is cost-effective because when you look at the entire picture and everything it takes to produce and deliver quality programs online, including whether to adopt software on their own and to host it in a highly redundant, high-performing manner on a scale that's required to provide a 24/7 help desk and technical support, our price point is actually very reasonable and of tremendous value.

IMS Global: Earlier this summer, eCollege merged with Pearson Education. How has that union changed your business model as well as Pearson's?

IMS Global: It really hasn't changed the model at all. I think one of the reasons Pearson was interested in eCollege was the success of our business model, the success of our product model and the success of our management team. I think they are wisely looking for areas of incremental improvement, whether that is through enhanced selling opportunities in the K-12 market because of their strong presence in that market, international opportunities or integration of their industry-leading formative assessment and homework tools into our eCollege course management system. This partnership benefits all of our customers.

Beyond that, we're still headquartered in Denver, we still have the same management team, we haven't reduced our headcount and in fact, we're looking at additional investment to accelerate our product roadmap. For example, we're currently looking to accelerate our integration with the Pearson MyLab tools, an online product series that has been very successful in assisting struggling students in subjects like math, physics, and economics, among others. Also, we're starting to expand internationally, and because Pearson has 30,000 employees in 60 countries around the world, we can leverage their expertise of local cultures to grow smartly internationally, which will benefit our customers even more.