The educational services giant, which has been supplanted in the space by 2U, Coursera and others, sells its online services unit to a private equity firm in an unsettled landscape. Tuesday the company announced that Regent, a California-based private equity firm, would take over Pearson Online Learning Services, in exchange for 27.5 percent of the profit the unit generates over each of the next six years and that same proportion of any proceeds Regent earns in a “monetization event” after Pearson sells it.
