The Financial Times and Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, today unveiled a new FT Education API that offers students and educators the opportunity to access free, award-winning content from the Financial Times.

The API, created on Pearson’s developer platform, enables free access to FT articles, 30 days after original publication. Access to this rich library of content can help students bring learning to life with real world case studies and context and develop a deeper understanding of global business, economic, political and social issues.

The University of St Gallen in Switzerland is an early adopter of the new royalty free licence. It uses articles to create case studies for students to use in preparation for mock job interviews, equipping them for competitive job markets.

Professor Simon Evenett, Academic Director at St Gallen (MBA) commented on the potential of the licence: “The feedback on the use of FT articles in our Learning Assessment Week has been excellent. It really helped to clarify what the students need to do in the classroom, and they’ve started reading the FT more regularly because of it. The professors on the panel thought the range of articles was great, and the corporate partners really liked the way that students were focusing on the themes in the news and seeing the big picture.”

Diana Stepner, Head of Future Technologies at Pearson, added: “Online learning is changing the way we teach and how students interact in and out of the classroom. There are so many new exciting possibilities and injecting world class FT journalism into this new learning environment is a powerful way to engage with students and help them make a real impact while studying and in the job market.”

Caspar de Bono, Managing Director B2B, Financial Times, said: “Employers want to hire students who are able to apply theory in practice and are well informed of commercial issues and international markets. This licence and API are designed to help educators use articles from the FT in the creation of new engaging learning resources.”

The news follows the announcement of the FT’s royalty free republishing licence back in June.

You can access the FT Education API through the Pearson Developer Website.

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Alyssa Zeisler
Financial Times
T: +44 (0) 20 7873 4920
E: Alyssa.Zeisler@FT.com,

Erin Farber
Pearson
T: +1 917 697 2027
E: Erin.Farber@Pearson.com

Julia Nightingale
Pearson
T: +44 (0) 207 932 5596
E: Pearson@marlinpr.com

This is not the first time Pearson has looked to share the award winning news and analysis of the Financial Times with students around the world. Wall Street Institute, the Pearson-owned English learning company, teamed up with the Financial Times to launch the free app AppGrade, an educational game based on editorial content from the FT. The app is designed for those learning English and helps to pull together premium content into a game to inspire another level of learners.

An application program interface, or API, allows two separate pieces of software to communicate with each other.

The Financial Times, one of the world’s leading business news organisations, is recognised internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy. Providing essential news, comment, data and analysis for the global business community, the FT has a combined paid print and digital circulation of more than 629,000 (Deloitte assured, Q3 2013).Mobileis an increasingly important channel for the FT, driving more than a third of FT.com traffic and a quarter of digital subscriptions. FT education products now serve 32 of the world’s top 50 business schools.

Pearson is the world’s leading learning company, providing educational materials and services, business information through the Financial Times Group, and consumer publishing through the Penguin brand. Pearson serves learners of all ages around the globe, employing 48,000 people in more than 70 countries. For more information, visit www.pearson.com and watch our video here.

The licence allows the re-publisher to select up to 1,000 FT articles from a database of 100,000 articles with copyrights cleared. The articles become available for royalty free reuse 30 days after their original FT publication date and must be used as part of a larger, original work in which they make up no more than 50% of the whole. The articles cannot simply be republished in isolation or housed in a database for retrieval. This is in keeping with the purpose of the licence, which is to encourage the creation of new resources, rather than the redistribution of FT articles without any additional educational value. Publishers of the learning resources must attribute the articles to the FT according to the FT’s attribution instructions.