The fourth episode in the Publishing Vision webinar series discusses Educational Tech and its impacts on the educational publishing industry.

José Borghino is our moderator for this podcast. He is the Secretary-General of the International Publishers Association of Geneva, which he joined in 2013 as Policy Director and became the Secretary-General in 2015. Before joining the IPA, José was Manager of Industry Representation at the Australian Publishers Association. We have a great lineup of speakers in this podcast, each sharing a world of knowledge and experience in the Ed Tech universe of publishing. Each will speak briefly about the situation in their market regarding Ed Tech and the impact on education publishing. The scene is set by talking briefly about the IPA's Educational Publishing Forum, or EPF. This group is a committee of the IPA and has existed for about 12 years. It comprises K-12 educational publishers from 60 countries around the world. It has identified three key principles for educational publishing. Firstly, choice. Educational publishers are constantly innovating to create high-quality resources that teachers can use in their classrooms. Every classroom is different and every teacher should have a choice about the resources they want to use in those classrooms. The second principle is local solutions. Education everywhere in the world is local, local, local. In each country or region, it is determined by the local language culture and curriculum. And the third key principle is collaboration. The best educational outcomes are a product of intense collaboration between publishers, teachers, researchers and governments.

The first speaker is Kiarie Kamau. He is the Managing Director and CEO of the East African Educational Publishers - a leading publishing house in the East and Central Africa. Kiarie is also a council member of the Kenyan Publishers Association, a member of the Council of Management of the UK-based African Books Collective and a member of the International Publishers Association Copyright Policy Working Group. Our second speaker is Erin Kinard, who is Vice President of Product Management and Strategy for Core Solutions at Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt. Erin is responsible for the overall success and profitability of the English language arts, social studies, maths, science and world languages core product lines. Erin and her team of product managers develop HMH's product line vision, strategy, and roadmaps. Following on from Kairie Erin, we have Fei Chen Lee who will share her wisdom and experience. She is currently the Senior Advisor to Times Publishing Group in Singapore. She was Head of Publishing at Marshall Cavendish Publishing Group from 2008 to 2019 and was responsible for formulating and implementing strategies to grow the group's publishing operations worldwide. Fei Chen has worked in publishing businesses in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand. She was instrumental in setting up Times Publishing Group's electronic publishing business and prior to that, she worked at the Ministry of Education in Singapore and also as a lecturer in Hong Kong.

It is also worth noting that Fei Chen has written an illuminating chapter entitled What is Education for in the 21st Century?, which is contained in one of the IPA's recently released state-of-publishing reports, available on the IPA website at www.internationalpublishers.org

The final speaker on our podcast is Caroline Wright, who is Director General at the British Educational Suppliers Association, or BESA, the UK's trade body for educational suppliers and publishers. Caroline is Vice-Chair of the Department of Education's Ed Tech Leadership Group, a member of the Department for International Trades Education Advisory Group, and she received the Education Investors Outstanding Contribution of the Year Award in 2017.