Textbook giant McGraw-Hill Education is opening a research-and-development lab in Boston to further advance its push into digital publishing and educational software.
The New York company, one of the biggest educational publishers in the country, plans to open the office in the coming weeks in the city’s Innovation District, the South Boston Waterfront neighborhood that has become a magnet for big software companies and small Internet start-ups.
Over the past several months, McGraw-Hill has built up its technology division with key hires from competitors such as Pearson Education, which has a large local presence, and Boston-based Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, as well as by hiring Harvard Business School’s former chief information officer, Stephen Laster, to lead its digital endeavors. He will be based out of the new Boston office.
“As we looked around at our strategy, the missing piece was not having a center in Boston,” said Laster, who left Harvard to join McGraw-Hill last year.
The office will draw on the region’s deep educational expertise, as home of major universities and educational companies, as well as the technology talent around Boston. The company plans to hire about 60 people locally — such as education specialists and software developers — to work on a range of products for its digital offerings. McGraw-Hill operates similar offices in Washington, New York, Ohio, California, and Israel.
Like other textbook publishers, McGraw-Hill offers numerous mobile apps and e-books for educators. But, as Laster put it, bringing more technology into the classroom means much more than just turning printed books into digital ones; it means creating entirely new kinds of interactive software programs for students.
Laster said McGraw-Hill is also looking to tap into the area’s growing number of so-called ed-tech start-ups, young technology firms focused on the education market, such as the Cambridge testing company Testive.
In fact, McGraw-Hill wants the lab to operate more like a scrappy, small tech start-up than a publishing company that dates its origins to 1909 by adopting “an agile, experimental, and creative approach to product development,” Laster said.
Indeed, all the big educational publishers are increasingly acting like technology companies in the race to replace printed books in the classroom, said Bill Rust, an analyst at Gartner Inc., a research firm. Pearson operates a similar research-and-development arm, Pearson Labs.
“McGraw-Hill is neither ahead nor behind on this, and the fact that they’re putting development [into] it is good for them,” he said.
But the primary obstacle facing all of these companies is how to execute on the promise of adding better technology into the classroom in a practical way that school districts everywhere can afford.
After all, Rust pointed out, the era of printed textbooks, which remains a multibillion dollar industry, is hardly over. “Everyone says that digital books will replace printed ones, but the problem is how to do it.”
Michael B. Farrell can be reached at michael.farrell@globe.com.