School systems and colleges love these online services because they do most of the legwork (grading and grade management) completely automatically, which allows

School systems and colleges love these online services because they do most of the legwork (grading and grade management) completely automatically, which allows the instructor to have much larger section sizes (without having to hire grading staff). Pearson, the leading provider of these, likes to market them as better for teaching but everyone in education understands that what they're actually better for is bottom-line cost. It's an extremely frustrating trend, particularly since on the whole students seem to uniformly despise these services, but education is highly budget-constrained and this is one of the areas where it really shows. It's either online homework or pay more in taxes/tuition. Edit: while I'm making Pearson sound vaguely evil, I should mention that the cost of these services is usually mostly offset onto the students, as the textbooks come with a one-time-use activation code for the online service that effectively eliminates the used textbook market. Of course in K-12 public school systems, the taxpayers still end up footing the bill.