Mondays are
almost always big days for deals, but talk about flying under the radar. With
Cerberus
Capital Management LP buying Chrysler for $7.4 billion and Cardinal Health
Inc. snapping up Viasys Healthcare Inc. for $1.4 billion, the sale of
eCollege.com is just a blip on the dealmaking screen. Yet the
transaction came as a surprise, especially since few knew the entire company
was on the
block.
Textbook publisher Pearson plc, owner of the Financial Times newspaper,
announced Monday that
its
Pearson Education Inc. unit is buying education software maker eCollege for
about $538 million,
Bloomberg
and the
Associated
Press reported. In October, eCollege, which creates online campuses for
universities and high schools, hired a strategic adviser to sell its Datamark
Inc. enrollment division,
TheDeal.com
reported. ECollege is selling the
Datamark division for $41 million to an investor group led by Oakleigh Thorne,
according to the Associated Press, and Pearson will get the rest of the
company. Pearson bought eCollege to add online degree courses in the U.S.
Earlier this month, Pearson announced it would buy Reed Elsevier's Harcourt
unit for $950 million. —Cheryl
Meyer
See
story from TheDeal.com
See
story from Bloomberg
See
story from the Associated Press
See
story from TheDeal.com
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