About Products and Resources

Products and resources are created, defined, and accessed as follows:

  1. Units of content, known as digital assets in RUMBA, are authored in different environments and repositories outside of RUMBA.
  2. A resource represents protected access to one or more digital assets as determined by the business unit owner or creator of the resource. An administrator defines the resource and its details, such as descriptions and URLs, in RADmin, but the content remains outside of RUMBA. A RUMBA ID is generated for each resource defined in RUMBA.
  3. In RADmin, an administrator defines a product, which consists of one or more resources. The administrator also indicates if there are any external system identifiers for the product such as an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) from a system like SAP (Systems, Applications and Products). After a product is defined, only members of the Pearson business unit or organization that is the product owner can make changes to the product.
  4. An external organization places an order and purchases licenses to the product, enabling users in the organization to subscribe to the product. Users at other organizations (called qualifying organizations) can also access the license. For example, a student at a school can use a product licensed by the district.
  5. Users, including teachers and students, create Pearson accounts with usernames and passwords and subscribe to the product.
  6. When a user signs in to access the product, an SSO (single sign-on) session is established with RUMBA, which determines whether the user can access the product.

This image shows the relationships among the steps:

Image showing how products and resources are created, defined, and accessed

Products

A product consists of a bundle of resources that can be subscribed to and accessed by users. Products might be in a series or program. A program is any group of products. It can be a series like MasteringBiology, a franchise like Campbell Biology, or a book series like Idiot’s Guides. Programs can contain other programs. The author might have several books with multiple editions and supplementary products. Each book is a program and all of the items under that author are a program. The CG Program (currently in RUMBA) is used to classify products according to commonly understood groups like Middle Grade Social Studies, Realidades, and Envision Math. Similar to the HE Series concept, this is a way to group digital product offerings for sales, marketing, or reporting purposes. Customers often know their products by the program name, although, there might be one or more products under the program.

Subscriptions

Users subscribe to products for an instructor-led online course or self-study. In the institutional licensing model, a user creates a Pearson account and subscribes to a product through an associated organization, such as a school, that purchased a license from Pearson. Once the user has a subscription, he or she can access the resources in the product according to its restrictions, if any.

Product Configuration

Once digital assets or content is developed outside of RUMBA, an administrator defines the access for those assets or content through RUMBA products in RADmin. The administrator specifies the product's internal information, consumer information, and resources.

After a product or resource is created, it is submitted to the approval queue to be accepted or rejected. If an item is accepted, it goes live. If the item is rejected, it goes under review by the owner.

Resources

A resource or digital asset is content that is included in a product offered by Pearson. Sample resources are a website, eText, eText portion (a section, chapter, or bundle of chapters), course material, video, podcast or audio, or mixed media in a single repository.

Some resources are available for users to access online while others are internal to Pearson. Restrictions, including instructor-only or administrator-only, determine the type of user who can access an individual resource. Apart from restricted resources, users who subscribe to a product have access to all of its resources.

Resources are defined and assigned an identifier in RUMBA, but the content is stored on an external system with its own identifier. When you define a resource in RADmin, you specify its internal and consumer information and associate it with a product.

If a group of resources are always sold together, they are considered one resource in a product and have only one RUMBA resource ID. If a group of resources are sold separately, they are considered to be multiple resources bundled in a product and each have a RUMBA resource ID.

Authorization Context

An authorization context:

Every authorization context is associated with a platform. When a request for authorization is made, RUMBA uses the user ID and authorization context to determine which resources to return. You can create new or select existing authorization contexts. An authorization context can only be associated with one platform, but a platform can be associated with many authorization contexts.