This year, Kortext, the digital learning content and student experience expert, celebrates 10 years of pioneering digital innovation in higher education through its extensive eBook inventory and cutting-edge content discovery and smart study platforms.
Led by CEO James Gray, Kortext sprang to life in 2013 with a vision to enable and enrich higher education of tomorrow and help all students fulfil their potential through digital teaching and learning solutions.
Developing partnerships with organisations across the sector, including tech giants like Microsoft and Samsung, government departments, and early adopter university customers such as the University of Manchester and Middlesex University, Kortext went from strength to strength.
By 2018, it had become the UK’s leading supplier of digital textbooks and educational resources to the HE sector, provided through the Kortext Arcturus eBook and smart study platform.
The pandemic hit the education sector hard, but also set in motion a new digital revolution worldwide, accelerating adoption of accessible EdTech solutions like Kortext to allow learning to continue during lockdown. Leveraging key publisher partnerships, Kortext responded to the pandemic with the Free Student eTextbook Programme (FSTP), making thousands of digital textbooks and other essential resources available to students for free at over 140 UK universities.
Fast forward to today, Kortext is recognised by UK university purchasing consortia as a trusted digital content provider, and now has a global presence in the education community, with offices in multiple countries and business representatives all over the world.
Over the past decade, Kortext has accrued countless achievements and accolades: developing the widely used Digital Content Store for the Copyright Licensing Agency in 2016; engaging in regular Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives such as its ongoing partnership with student mental health charity, Student Minds; relaunching its re-engineered smart study platform as Kortext Arcturus in 2022; and most recently welcoming HE data aggregator, Solutionpath, into the Kortext family. In this time, Kortext has also built lasting relationships with over 4,700 publishers, partnered with over 85% of Russell Group universities to help drive their digital strategies, and now supports students at over 2,300 universities worldwide.
In a recent case study, Prof. Peter Rodgers, MBA Director at Southampton Business School, commented:
“We have an excellent ongoing relationship with Kortext. It was a very timely partnership for us[…]. Before their induction, students have lots of questions about how to prepare for their course and what books they need to buy. We can now say to them, ‘You don’t need to buy them, they’re already in your digital library on the Kortext Arcturus platform’.”
Kortext CEO and Founder, James Gray, said:
“The last decade has brought with it challenges, successes and surprises in equal measure. No one could have foreseen the effect of the pandemic, the subsequent shift to digitally enabled teaching and learning, and the impact that would have on students, academics and whole institutions. Looking forward, we’re eager to see how higher education will evolve and, indeed, how digital technology will continue to embed itself in the learning landscape.
“Our vision remains the same as always, to enable and enrich higher education of tomorrow and help all students fulfil their potential through the use of our cutting-edge platforms and technologies. This is why we’re continuing to invest in new and exciting teaching and learning tools, tapping into the latest technology and the power of artificial intelligence to further improve the experience for universities and their students.”
