Susan K. Badger Joins WebAssign Advisory Board

Publishing and e-learning industry leader to guide growth and development of innovative online homework service

Raleigh, N.C., January 18, 2008 - WebAssign, the leading service provider for online, math-science homework and quizzing delivery in higher education, today announced that Susan K. Badger is joining the company's advisory board. Badger, a highly regarded senior publishing executive and e-learning strategist, with more than 20 years of experience leading marquee publishers, is being tapped to strengthen the company's market position and to guide its long-term strategy.

"Susan's wealth of publishing and e-learning experience, along with her specific expertise in helping publishing and education businesses capitalize on innovative technologies, will be critical in helping WebAssign achieve the next level of growth," said John Risley, President of WebAssign. "With Susan's guidance, we expect to strengthen existing partnerships with textbook publishers, to break into new academic disciplines and to create new business models that will align more closely with the needs of both faculty and students."

WebAssign is a Web-based homework and assessment system that allows instructors to create customized assignments and deliver them to students online. The system automatically grades the work and distributes the results to students and their teachers. The service was developed during the 1990s by faculty and staff in the department of physics at North Carolina State University to handle assignments for the large flow of students through their introductory courses.

"Numerous studies, including those sponsored by WebAssign, have shown that personalized and customized online assessment improves student learning without compromising efficacy, accuracy or judgment in the teaching process," said Badger. "With university class sizes growing and student bodies becoming increasingly diverse, online homework and assessment, and other technologically advanced means of supporting learning, are becoming more important to students' academic achievement. I look forward to helping WebAssign grow and develop in ways that will allow instructors to be more effective and help students be more successful."

Badger has more than two decades of experience in the publishing and education industries. For the last 11 years she served as CEO of Thomson Higher Education, the largest division of Thomson Learning (now Cengage Learning). During her tenure there, she led the transformation of what had been a traditional textbook publisher into a multimedia print, online and electronic learning solutions provider and high-value global enterprise. Under her leadership, Thomson Learning invested more than $100 million in new technology, platforms and processes that pushed the company to the forefront of the e-learning industry. Those investments led to a 60 percent jump in digital solutions usage and revenue between 2005 and 2007. While at Thomson she also forged and developed numerous innovative partnerships and alliances, including those with CNN, InfoTrac, elluminate, iParadigms, Turning Technology, Aplia, OWL, and WebAssign.

Prior to Thomson Higher Education, Badger served in senior leadership roles at Pearson and Random House/McGraw Hill. She was a founding board member of CourseSmart, and has also served on the boards of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA).

To learn more about WebAssign, please visit www.webassign.net.

About WebAssign

WebAssign has been leading the field of online homework systems in innovation, responsiveness and acceptance by higher education since its inception in 1997. Currently, the service is used by hundreds of thousands of students and teachers nationwide and internationally. WebAssign is a hosted system headquartered at North Carolina State University's Centennial Campus in Raleigh, with servers located at MCNC in Research Triangle Park.

Media Contacts:

Gabrielle Zucker Acevedo
Kwittken & Company on behalf of WebAssign
646-747-7143
Gzucker@kwitco.com