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Gates Foundation-backed InBloom frees up data to personalize k-12 education

Ki Mae Heussner — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 22:08:16 +0000

In education, there’s no shortage of data that could theoretically help educators tailor learning experiences to each student. But because the data comes from so many different sources and in so many different formats, schools may have trouble putting it to use.

In the past year, startups like Clever and LearnSprout have started to help schools liberate their data, and larger companies have slowly begun to release APIs. But a new nonprofit launching Tuesday will hopefully help move the needle even further when it comes to bringing big data to schools.

Supported with $100 million from the Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and others, InBloom is the outgrowth of the Shared Learning Collaborative, an alliance of states, districts, nonprofits and corporations pushing for personalized learning in the classroom.

“There is a consensus that personalized learning is the way to go,” said InBloom CEO Iwan Streichenberger. “The big question is, how to do you make it happen? How do you share data and make it accessible? We’re a catalyst — a connector between data that exists already to make it easier to access.”

InBloom stores the data and provides integration tools and services to allow schools, districts, states and other vendors to aggregate student data from Student Information Systems, testing vendors and other sources. It also helps educators find instructional content aligned with certain standards so they can match it to their students’ needs.

At launch, InBloom is working with nine states. Twenty-two education technology companies, including Clever, LearnSprout, Scholastic, Wireless Generation and Schoology, have announced plans to developed applications that will work with InBloom.

“To personalize learning, the first part is diagnostics – where are [students] on the learning path? – and the second part is, once you know where they are on the learning path, what’s the next step?,” said Streichenberger. InBloom’s services address both needs.

By creating a neutral, nonprofit group to help connect the data, the hope is that schools won’t encounter as much friction when companies and organizations want to access student data for assessment programs or other ed tech tools.

Image by Mopic via Shutterstock.

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Y Combinator-backed education data startup Clever scores $3M seed round

Ki Mae Heussner — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 15:15:06 +0000

Until recently, education technology hasn’t been seen as a big winner among venture capitalists. But here’s yet more evidence that investors are giving the category another look.

Clever, an education data startup that was part of Y Combinator’s summer class, is set to announce Monday that it’s raised a healthy $3 million in seed funding.

The San Francisco-based company not only attracted investments from leaders in the education field, including Princeton Review and 2U (previously 2tor) founder John Katzman, Chegg founder Aayush Phumbhra and Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis, it drew the backing of some of Silicon Valley’s top consumer tech investors. The company said the majority of the Y Combinator partners personally participated in the round, as did SV Angel, Floodgate’s Mike Maples, SoftTech VC’s Jeff Clavier, Google Ventures, Bessemer, Kapor Capital’s Mitch Kapor, and actor/investor Ashton Kutcher.

Clever founders Dan Carroll, Tyler Bosmeny and Rafael Garcia (from left)

CEO and co-founder Tyler Bosmeny said that for many investors, it was their first ed tech investment. “They’re excited by something that has this much potential to improve education at a systemic level,” he said.

As we wrote about back in August when Clever graduated from Y Combinator, the startup plays a key role in helping education-focused developers access student data stored in legacy Student Information Systems (SISes). That process, which is being similarly tackled by another San Francisco startup LearnSprout, has historically been a big headache for schools and developers. Without API platforms, accessing student data (such as attendance records, grades and addresses) can be a weeks-long, error-prone process that discourages schools from incorporating new technology.

Clever said it now charges more than 40 software companies, including Scientific Learning, Dreambox Learning and TenMarks, for access to its platform. And Bosmeny said the company has doubled the number of schools using Clever from 1,000 in August to 2,000 schools and 650,000 students, including charter schools and major public school districts.

As of now, the company is just six people but, as they grow, Bosmeny said, they’re increasingly attracting talent from Silicon Valley big guns Google, Facebook and Twitter.

“One of the things they keep saying is I really want to work on problems that can change the world,” he said. “[In education], we think this is potentially the biggest thing – this problem of data.”

Image by Tatiana Popova via Shutterstock.

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LearnSprout frees up data to let innovation break into the classroom

Ki Mae Heussner — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 20:02:53 +0000

Last fall, when LearnSprout cofounder and one-time Facebooker Frank Chien called up his college buddies Joe Woo, previously with Microsoft, and Anthony Wu, a former Googler, he didn’t necessarily have an education startup in mind.

The trio could have tackled healthcare or energy instead, he said. What mattered was that they go for something big — dent-the-universe, shake-up-the-system significant.

“I [told them], let’s do something crazy,” he said. “We can stay at our jobs forever or we can swing for the fences.”

Not too much later, the three engineers, who met at the University of Washington, quit their jobs. Over the past ten months, they’ve built a startup taking on a major obstacle facing innovators interested in K-12 education: the siloed way in which student data is stored.

In most school districts, information about students — from grades and attendance records, to addresses and more — is stored in Student Information Systems (SISes) that are managed by several different decades-old companies. When developers want to access that data for new learning management systems, assessment programs or other new ed tech tools, they have to go to each district individually to initiate a tedious, error-prone, potentially weeks-long process of importing and uploading CSV files and manually entering data.

APIs for education enable data portability, transparency

The process is time-consuming and labor-intensive and it ultimately not only discourages schools from welcoming new innovation, it makes it difficult for enterprising ed tech startups to scale.

But LearnSprout’s cofounders, who specialize in systems integration, realized that they could build simple APIs for education data to streamline the process and reduce the time it takes to integrate data from potentially several weeks to a matter of days.

“These solutions have existed in your Fortune 500 companies, but no one had taken the time to do this in education,” said Woo. “We saw this growth in enterprise IT for the past decade. We saw what it could do — the power of the data — as it moved from one system to another.”

Since launching its platform in April, LearnSprout, which recently graduated from education startup accelerator Imagine K12, has worked with more than 15 clients and 150 schools and is bringing in revenue. Its basic service is free to schools — which is a boon for their bottom line given schools’ long sales cycles and constrained budgets — and it charges developers once they’ve signed a contract with a school system. To date, the company has raised nearly $1 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Formation 8, as well as other individual investors.

With new products, LearnSprout goes from data integration to data solutions

This week, the company is launching its newest products, which move it from being just a data integrations company to a data solutions company, Chien said.

In addition to its initial data integration tool — which it now calls LearnSprout Connect — the startup is rolling out LearnSprout HallPass, Provisioning and Verify, which give schools a single sign-on for managing multiple tools, help them create accounts for teachers and students to make it easier to introduce new technology and clean up what can often be “dirty data.” LearnPass Verify, for example, gives developers and schools early warnings about incomplete or incorrect data (names in phone number fields, for example) to improve its long-term integrity.

The startup has grown to include seven employees (five of whom are engineers — not a surprise given the nature of their work). And its trajectory is quite impressive when you consider that, when it started less than a year ago, its founders knew virtually nothing about education other than that they wanted to attack it because it was the most “stale” industry of the three they were considering.

Along the way, however, LearnSprout made one key pivot. After landing on education, the founders decided to build a learning management system (LMS) — a software platform that lets teachers deliver content and communicate with students, and track and report progress. But while building the first version of their own LMS, they realized the meta issue involving data, as well as the considerable competition in that space, and switched tacks.

While LearnSprout was early in addressing the underlying data issue, it’s not the only startup going after the problem. Clever, an ed tech startup that will graduate from startup accelerator Y Combinator next week, also wants to be what some have called a “Twilio for education” with a simple API that helps developers tap into student data. But Chien said the companies take different approaches to integrate data, with LearnSprout using multiple techniques to pull out the SIS information.

And, though the company might have toyed with other industries at the very beginning, there’s little doubt that they’re firmly focused on education.

“Teachers and professors have a multiplier value,” said Woo. “If you can improve the efficiency of an individual teacher or professor, that has a trickle down effect.”

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