Continuing Education

Alliances between owners of licensed properties and providers of educational curriculum can take many forms. They involve a diverse roster of property types and can target the whole spectrum of age groups, as these recent deals attest:

• Sesame Workshop licensed McGraw-Hill Education to use its Sesame Street characters in a free version of MHE’s Wonders literacy program, to launch in U.S. schools in the 2019-2020 school year. The content, which marks the Workshop’s largest presence in the school market to date, also features social-emotional topics and comes with a teacher’s guide and a parental newsletter in 10 languages featuring additional educational material. Sesame Workshop also recently renewed its deal with CollegePre to bring its Sesame Street English curriculum to China.
• The Smithsonian paired with Carnegie Learning to create a STEM curriculum for children, based on information from the Smithsonian Science Education Center. The organization also teamed with WorldStrides for educational travel programs for high school students, featuring courses on subjects including history, science, and math.
• CBS Consumer Products and the Smithsonian are jointly working with NetDragon Websoft for an adult online learning platform built around the Star Trek franchise and focusing on technology and social issues (e.g. eugenics, racial tensions, runaway artificial intelligence). The first course is “Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology,” taught by a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum curator and a former Access Hollywood anchor.
• Time Inc. partnered with the Culinary Institute of America for a series of Food & Wine-branded educational food festivals encompassing a weekend of hands-on cooking classes and educational courses on topics such as global street foods and California wine regions.
• Peanuts Worldwide signed a deal with NASA for a STEM-centric curriculum focused on deep-space exploration, featuring Snoopy in the role of an astronaut. The material is timed to the 50th anniversary of Apollo 10 and the moon mission.
• Universal Brand Development partnered with Roblox to create a limited-edition, self-paced, online coding program that teaches beginning coders to build and customize Jurassic World-themed creations. Simultaneously but separately, Roblox Education rolled out a curriculum on coding fundamentals, digital citizenship, game design, and entrepreneurship, delivered through 500 summer coding camps globally.

All of these ventures were announced or launched in 2018. They illustrate not only the varied possibilities when it comes to pairing licensed properties with an educational curriculum, but also the proliferation of such programs in recent years.