VitalSource Launch

VitalSource is one of the largest digital textbook platforms in higher education, used at more than 80% of US institutions and serving millions of learners worldwide. Its catalog spans over two million titles from thousands of publishers.

Launch is the integration layer that connects learning management systems, campus bookstores, student information systems, and publisher content into a single experience. When a student clicks a course materials link inside their LMS, Launch handles the authentication, provisioning, and routing so the content opens without a separate login, access code, or manual setup.

I worked on Launch for three and a half years, building and maintaining the platform through rapid growth, a major acquisition, and a big expansion in institutional adoption.

Getting course materials to students has always been a mess. Students juggle access codes, separate publisher logins, and bookstore purchases across multiple systems. Institutions run complex programs like Inclusive Access and Day One Access that promise students their materials from the first day of class, but the integration work to make that happen touches every system in the chain: the LMS, the registrar, the bookstore, and every publisher's content platform.

Launch sits in the middle of all of that. It uses the LTI standard to integrate with any compliant LMS, pulls real-time enrollment data to provision the right materials to the right students, handles single sign-on so there are no extra credentials to manage, and passes grades from publisher courseware back into the institutional gradebook.

• Single sign-on and content provisioning through LTI integration with Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, D2L Brightspace, and other LMS platforms. Students authenticate once and get routed to their materials.
• Roster and enrollment sync, pulling real-time data to automate content access, handle add/drop changes, and drive accurate billing for institutional programs.
• Deep linking into specific chapters, pages, and assignments within eTextbooks and courseware, with support for course duplication across sections.
• Grade passback from publisher courseware assessments into the institutional LMS gradebook.
• Inclusive Access and Day One Access program support, giving institutions the infrastructure to run programs that guarantee materials from the start of the term and manage student opt-out decisions.

My time at VitalSource coincided with a stretch of significant growth. In 2014, VitalSource acquired CourseSmart, gaining access to an estimated 90% of higher-education e-textbooks in use and bringing major new analytics and content-sampling capabilities into the platform. Integrating CourseSmart's catalog and infrastructure was a large engineering effort that ran through 2016.

Over the same period, institutional adoption of Inclusive Access programs accelerated, and Launch's role as the connective infrastructure for those programs expanded. By the time I left, VitalSource was moving toward eliminating access codes entirely and piloting direct courseware integrations with publishers like Pearson and Macmillan.

Core technologies I worked with: