Bloomsbury Publishing
A suite of interconnected educational technology platforms serving institutions worldwide.
Eight-year partnership building and maintaining a suite of educational technology platforms — from interactive learning tools to a centralised authentication system serving institutions worldwide. A relationship that survived a corporate acquisition and kept growing.
The Relationship
I started working with Macmillan International Higher Education (MIHE) in 2018 on their digital education platforms. When Bloomsbury Publishing acquired MIHE in 2021, they kept me on — continuity matters when one person understands the entire platform ecosystem. What began as development support on a single product has evolved into an eight-year partnership across four interconnected platforms that share authentication, infrastructure patterns, and a library of reusable custom modules.
The Platform Ecosystem
Bloomsbury's digital education products form an interconnected ecosystem. Each platform delivers specialist content to universities and institutions, while a central Authentication Hub manages access, subscriptions, and SSO across all of them.
- Skills for Study — Study skills learning platform with interactive content, assessments, and diagnostic tests for university students
- Social Work Toolkit — Regional educational platform for social work professionals, with country-specific content restrictions and institutional customisation
- Cite Them Right Tutorial — Academic citation training (Harvard, APA, etc.) with modular learning paths, practice activities, and grade passback to university VLEs
- Authentication Hub — Centralised subscription management and SSO system connecting institutions to all digital products via SAML/Shibboleth, IP authentication, and email domain validation
What Ties It Together
All four platforms share a common technical foundation that I built and maintain:
- Shared custom modules for authentication, LTI integration, reporting, and user management — written once, deployed across all products
- LTI 1.3 integration embedding content directly into Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, and Brightspace without separate logins
- Centralised SSO via the Authentication Hub, managing institutional subscriptions and multi-method authentication (Shibboleth, IP, email domain)
- Multi-tenant architecture supporting hundreds of institutions, each with custom branding, analytics, and user management
- Consistent infrastructure — all hosted on Platform.sh with Redis caching, Solr search, and SendGrid email delivery
- Ongoing maintenance — regular Drupal core and security updates, major version upgrades (D8 → D9 → D10), and continuous feature development
The Results
A portfolio of production platforms that have been running reliably for eight years, serving universities and institutions globally. The shared module architecture means new features built for one product often benefit the others. The Authentication Hub has eliminated per-product access management, giving Bloomsbury a single place to manage all institutional subscriptions. And because one developer understands the entire ecosystem, issues get diagnosed and resolved faster than they would with separate teams.