Good for them! I was recently in charge of a team that developed a website to teach remedial algebra to children, which is now used extensively in Florida middle and high schools. The signin system, using Clever as a bridge, incorporated districts' native signin systems, so teachers and students could just use their familiar school logins to get in the system. Out of the gate we had to support over half a million students.
Working with their API was really a delight, and I certainly have experience with some less than enjoyable services. Apparently public school IT systems are notoriously a pain in the neck to work with, but Clever just abstracts all of that out so you don't have to worry about it. Clever's development team was also very competent and professional. They seemed to really know their stuff and went out of their way to help us be successful. Assuming they take proactive steps to protect teacher and student personal data I wish them all the success in the world!
Last Spring, Clever was pitching me for a job (which full disclosure I accepted). I was dubious, edtech startups don't have the best track record, and they had barely gotten started (just got into YC). However after hearing the problem they set out to solve, and seeing how they planned to do it, I was convinced. Clever bypasses most of the biggest problems edtech startups run into, specifically selling to schools. Schools don't like to pay for things, and when they do it's shrouded in bureaucracy. Clever is free for schools, and instead sells to developers, easing their pain and in turn making it easier for them to sell and get setup with schools. From the Clever point of view a new schools takes 5 minutes to onboard.
This is one of the major points that allowed us to see this level of growth over the past year, and I'm excited to see where Clever takes education going forward.
We're also actively hiring so head over to our jobs page if being on the forefront of a revolution in the edtech space sounds interesting to you. https://getclever.com/about/jobs
I just want to say, I absolutely love what you guys are doing. Rourke Publishing (a small, independent, K-12, non-fiction publisher) used to be a major client of mine, and I still consult with them from time to time. They recently called me asking about integrating one of their applications with a SIS (at the request of a customer). I remembered seeing you guys when you were part of YC. I looked up your app and documentation, and it was immediately clear that you guys are the clear front-runner. It ended up making my recommendation really easy: integrate with Clever, then point all your customers there.
I'm a teacher by day and a hacker on my own time, so I look at ed tech initiatives with a critical eye. One thing I want in educational offerings: free and open access for teachers, students, and schools. These kinds of offerings are the only kind that have the potential to truly disrupt existing learning gaps.
What you are describing sounds good, but I'd like to know: is what Clever offers truly open source, or is it just free as in beer?
From my quick perusal of the Clever site, I don't see any real assurance that this is a truly open offering. I admit I'm taking a quick look on my lunch break, so please correct me if my impression is off.
there are plenty of non-profits in the edtech space if you're really looking for "free and open access". Gooru (http://www.goorulearning.org/#discover) is a Google spinoff backed by the Gates Foundation and others, for instance.
It's not so much that I'm looking for nonprofits myself. I challenge the notion that anyone is really doing anything to improve public education if they are just another private company, with a profit motive, having access to student data.
I have rarely seen companies continue to serve students well when there is a profit motive involved. People should get paid well for their work, I have no issue with that. But I am wary of where the profit motive leads ed tech initiatives.
It sounds like you hit on a key strategic insight. If you're free to principals, they'll find a way to use you without the admin headaches of finding money in an era of declining budgets. They get the added benefit of better apps too.
It is a shame how silo-ed each K-12 system is, in regards to data/integration. It is also a shame as to what some/most vendors call an API (sorry, a nightly CSV is NOT an API). Only in education do you see such poor APIs and programming on a whole making tens/hundreds of millions of dollars. I've seen source code from several major players that would cause shivers in both the lack of quality and holes in security.
These are HUGE hurdles for districts. They often realize it too late and end up getting taken to the cleaners by some freelancer or company who milk the hours trying to do integrations/data-warehosues (I've seen 60k/1yr jobs that were solved with 10k/2wk rewrites).
Congratulations on the funding, I am excited to see any company that can help break down those barriers. Sorry that I sometimes take business away from you as a freelancer doing integrations sometimes (you do get mentioned from time-to-time) ;)
No need to apologize for your custom integration work. As a company building integrations in an automated & scalable way, we can't cover all possible use cases & combinations. I'm thrilled to see devs doing great work at a reasonable rate (& let's talk - maybe we can send some referrals your way!).
This sounds pretty interesting. I'm a bit confused by your business model though. It sounds like you aren't selling to schools but instead you are charging developers of education applications.
Who pays the the developers? Is the school expected to pay the developers?
Schools have been buying applications since long before Clever. These are usually (but not always) gaint contracts across multiple schools or districts. after they are signed it can take months or sometimes full schoolyears to get the app provisioned and set up. This has to happen every time data changes as well. With clever it takes minutes.
They charge companies like ours (Poll Everywhere) to push/pull instructor/student data into our app. Schools pay us for our product. Its super valuable because our developers can focus on building high-value features specific to our app and not boring LMS integration details.
I was thinking a similar thing... what kind of apps would I develop?
Sick day trackers, maybe some kind of grade statistics apps... there's a lot of value in these kinds of apps, but i'm not sure there's enough to support the infrastructure needed to sell things to thousands of different schools.
I built a student tracker/analytics app for use by parents (and students) which integrates with school systems, but I tend to agree that you could not charge parents enough to pay for the Clever integration costs.
The only way I think this will pan out for Clever is if they can somehow become the gatekeeper into the schools, whereby enterprise'ish edtech software companies are required to pay-to-play, such as an AppStore model. What I don't understand is why the existing back-office edtech software companies are allowing them to do so. They should be charging Clever significant integration/certification fees. Its done in other markets.
I may be entirely off the mark, but reading about this gives me pause as I think of all of the 3rd parties that invested in other platforms (Twitter), only to be cut-off later. Why would I hitch my ride to this wagon?
Clever act like they are doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. They aren't.
They act like this is "free" for schools. It isn't. Because the costs of Clever and LearnSprout get sent right back to the school in the form of higher fees for the other apps they buy. Oh, and instead of paying one price for Clever, they are going to pay that price over and over and over.
Clever is just another "Vertically Integrated Network" right out of 1999. Their customers are largely going to be VC-funded startups who want to show that they have "solved" this issue by paying the Clever tax. Since most of those VC-funded startups are going to be offering free-services themselves, Clever is really just a giant hoover vacuum for VC funds.
It's a 1999 business model and it will likely lead to the same resolution in the end.
Interesting comparison, but I think you might be missing a couple things:
1. Data integration is incredibly costly for edtech vendors - it's a massive engineering & support distraction, and it slows down sales and customer onboarding. Vendors tell us paying for Clever is worth it - just for the internal cost savings.
2. While seed-level edtech companies without revenue may get more attention on hackernews, there's a significant number of companies in various niches of education earning great revenues selling to schools and districts. Those are the folks adopting Clever & driving our growth (not "free to teacher" apps).
> ...there's a significant number of companies in various niches of education earning great revenues selling to schools and districts.
The spending trends in the K-12 space are not positive[1], and while I'm sure there are companies in "various niches of education" with respectable revenue, the bankruptcies of companies like Cengage Learning[2] and School Specialty[3] are hard to ignore.
There's a strong argument to be made that education as a market, particularly K-12 education, is in secular decline.
When your market is part of a larger market that is in secular decline, the secular trend eventually tends to dominate any local trends that are present in the sub-market.
That's why companies attempting to get a piece of a growing pie are generally easier to build and more likely to be successful than companies attempting to get a bigger piece of a shrinking pie.
I'll put aside a host of successful companies over the last 14 years that have been quite successful pursuing similar businesses.
Instead I'll challenge your assumption that the (enormous) efficiency gains you get from Clever result in higher prices for anyone. This is only true if the integration was otherwise free for the people selling products to schools.
It's not. It's actually incredibly expensive to perform these integrations on an ad-hoc basis. I'd bet this solution ends up cheaper for everyone.
I guess you could argue the downside of there being fewer programmer jobs available since people are having to do less work. That's a bummer I guess.
Despite the negative parent, wouldn't you agree that the cost of integration has to be absorbed by somebody? In this case, the application vendors have to pass the cost to the schools (plus a margin).
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The question is whether the schools will be better off having one party in control? That's usually not a recipe for cost containment.
Despite the negative parent, wouldn't you agree that the cost of integration has to be absorbed by somebody?
That's the point I'm making. Of course the integration has a cost. I believe that it simply costs a whole lot more of if everyone does that integration themselves. I can pay Clever a monthly fee or I can pay several developers to go out and learn how to do it at $100k a pop. Even if Clever is charging me $10k/month I'm still coming out pretty far ahead.
Not to mention the cost of ongoing maintenance every time something changes at an individual school.
tldr; you can spread the cost of integrating one time out among a bunch of companies, or each company can do it themselves. One of those is (by far) not only more efficient, but very likely much cheaper as well.
It IS incredibly expensive to perform these integrations on an ad hoc basis. That's the advantage of having a standard.
I personally find this entire thread extremely interesting, and enjo's comment gets to the heart of it. <Reader alert - I work for SIF>
Now here's my source of confusion. We are an non-profit standards organization with an open standard (written and approved by our members) that can be used without cost by all K-12 end users and vendors (members or not), and with no IP agreement to sign. True there is an optional product certification program, but that involves only a nominal fee to cover our costs. The SIF Certification program was created to support our end users who often demand products undergo SIF certification to ensure they will seamlessly interoperate (ideally out of the box - but there are a LOT of reasons including optional data elements, why things are often not that simple). The Clever folks know what I’m talking about ... or they will soon.
In earlier SIF releases, when the infrastructure was basically home grown, several integrators wrote what we call “agents” which allowed vendors (including vendors of SIS, Library, Transportation and more recently Assessment and LMS related systems) to essentially enable their applications run in SIF interoperability Zones without changing a line of code. For example some agents use internal application database triggers to detect data changes the application publishes. There are several free open source SIF Agent toolkits available today for SIF 2 and we expect the same for SIF 3 where the fact that the infrastructure is now based on REST will make things a lot easier.
So we finally reach my question. Some very smart people have invested $10 million dollars in Clever, but the stated business model seems (in SIF terms) to be to:
• Create and establish an API to retrieve data from SIS applications and
• Sell SIS vendors the agent software to allow them to utilize that API.
If that’s essentially correct (and if not, I would ask a Clever representative to correct me) than given our own experiences I just don’t understand how such a strategy can be effectively monetized to provide an acceptable return on such a large initial investment. And I’m particularly interested, because if I knew how to do that, I’d try and get my employers to do that too! :-)
You have to understand how schools get money, and how they spend money. As consumers, we have flexibility in how we can spend our money. Schools often do not have this flexibility. I'll provide an example of a scenario that I know intimately.
Schools buy educational content for classrooms and media labs. Increasingly, this content is electronic, but historically, schools are used to buying piles of dead trees covered in ink (physical books). Because of this historical precident, schools get their money in the form of large-dollar-amount, single-use budget allocations. Let me decode that. Someone in an administrative office notifies the person who will actually buy the materials and says something like, "You have $1.2 million dollars to spend by August. The checks must be issued by that date or the funds disappear."
So now the buyer is sitting on $1.2 million to spend by a specific date. Let's say I just built an ebook platform that allows students to log in to a website where I display non-fiction content, along with some reading comprehension questions. When I develop my pricing models, I have to make sure that they fit with the way the buyer spends their money. In the consumer space, we'd do something like:
All plans include access to over 900 titles!
$9.95/mo for up to 10 students
$19.95/mo for up to 25 students
$49.95/mo for up to 100 students
$99.99/mo for up to 500 students
More than 500 students? Call for custom pricing.
The buyer ignores your product completely. Why? Because they can't spend $100/month. The check has to be written by August, then the money goes away. The buyer is also used to buying physical books, so they're averse to the idea that they should pay monthly for something, even if it is much, MUCH cheaper. Remember, they don't know what their budgets will be next year, so "a bird in the hand" rules over value.
Instead, what often happens is that the publisher charges a one-time fee of $100,000 for 2,500 students, then agrees to keep the content accessible for as long as the school wants. The publisher takes on the risk associated with hosting the content, and is well compensated.
The school doesn't want to pay an API middleman, they want to buy content. Clever is very well situated, and publishers (and schools) are going to be very happy they exist.
Hmm. This is data which has no real value to schools themselves, which they are enticed to give access to for free. Other people wanting access to the data in aggregate are then required to pay the aggregators. Other aggregators can not plausibly compete with a better price, because the original aggregators (Clever) have occupied the very scarce mindshare of the schools’ “we give our data to these people” role. The schools will not be bothered to give the data to more than one aggregator, and so Clever thereby obtains an effective monopoly in providing aggregated data.
(It reminds me of Google book scanning thing, which has the same issue, but worse.)
I'm not sure that's an accurate portrayal of Clever's value prop. Clever is limited in what they can do with student data because of privacy laws. That's not really their play.
Their value proposition is in providing a common interface to the growing number of systems used to manage student information at schools in the United States.
Schools in the US are free to choose -- more accurately, must purchase their own -- student information system. Many different systems (old and new) exist in the market. If I'm an application developer who is building a literacy app that students will use in the media-lab/classroom at school, the customer (school) will inevitably need a way to get student performance data back in to their student management systems.
There are no industry-wide standards for this, currently. I wouldn't expect any to emerge in the immediate future either. Schools in the US are autonomous, and are structured differently in different areas of the country. For example, here in Florida, schools are organized in to large administrative districts, where decisions are made for groups of thousands of students. By contrast, in northern Ohio, each school is largely independent. Florida school districts are some of the largest, in the country. According to NCES, there were 13,629 school districts in the US as of 2010 [1]. That number is trending downward slowly, but that's still a very large number of independent bodies making decisions. We'll likely see some consolidation instandards, but given the backlash against "Common Core" (an attempt at a standardized curriculum), I wouldn't hold my breath.
> Clever is limited in what they can do with student data because of privacy laws. That's not really their play.
Um, what? I’m not even sure what you are implying that I claimed was Clever’s “play”. What I wrote has nothing to do with privacy, that would be a whole other issue.
There's LTI and BasicLTI as well. I'm sure there are more, but I'm not really involved in the space much any more. I do know this. I get phone calls from a friend in the industry asking for help, and every time I take a peak under the covers, I see that things continue to suck very, very hard. One of the biggest problems is bad implementations of an already lackluster standard.
I would posit as an axiom that getting good developers to work with shitty tools is a major hurdle to getting said developers to stick around. IMO, Clever will have a positive impact on the development of educational content, because they will abstract away a lot of the "suck" associated with interfacing with the common SIS/SMS applications in the market.
SCORM's a little different - it's a standard for "content objects" (think videos, quizzes, chunks of text) that should enable to content to be plugged into a variety of learning management systems. The "next generation" of SCORM is the Tin Can API/xAPI (http://tincanapi.com/). These standards were sponsored by the Department of Defense & haven't seen adoption in K-12 (that I'm aware of).
While this is technically true, unlike our customers, our main job is the intergration. This gives us the benefit of doing some things our customers don't want to dedicate time or money to do. It also gives us a wider view of the systems that are out there (one benefit of having 1/10 USA schools using your product), and allows us to build some really efficient pipelines.
For the vast majority of schools their data is syncing with their apps within a few minutes of them signing up. This is something that wouldn't be possible if we had to white glove every new school.
The quote is not true. I've personally done dozens and dozens of integrations, which can/are all be applied to any district. It's actually fairly simple with a functional programming approach, set theory, working with the k-12 companies directly, and if you think of them as data flows. I've taken over for some ex-fb/ex-google, large k-12 companies, vc funded ones... and every single one does it in a really coupled/tangled-mess manner where the statement is actually true (I take over their codebases). If done right, the integrations are a few hundred lines of code (even doing schools, courses, students, teachers, enrollments, grades, standards, etc). The only thing that changes between districts is typically a couple of business rules which are done as filters on the data flow. The unit/integration tests take more lines than the integration.
Example integration flow of SIS to LMS:
SIS client (pull) <- business rule filters <- integration itself -> business rule filters -> LMS client (push)
Example integration flow of LMS to SIS:
LMS client (pull) <- business rule filters <- integration itself -> business rule filters -> SIS client (push)
Working in education for years, I can tell you there is a real need for an open standard that is palatable and feasible for schools and vendors aiming to integrate with student systems.
this is exactly the point. This is only perpetuating the propriety and just changing the hurdles for vendors and schools to pass data. SIF was great in its time...it was expensive and cumbersome because it required specific knowledge which many district admins don't possess. The new SIF 3 using the CEDS should hope to alleviate many of these issues. As some one who has looked into data integration with Clever, the costs were prohibitive on a large scale, especially when you consider they are continual. While development may be expensive, we aren't paying for it after it is developed...
So open Standards look to be in pretty good shape. Perhaps Clever should support SIF as well? Then it wont be able to be blamed as being so propitiatory.
This is great. Hopefully this will fuel make the sales channel for grade level software easier.
I envision a Clever App Store, where districts/schools/teachers have credits that can be used to buy interactive work sheets, attendance apps, or whatever else developers dream up.
I'm a manager for a fairly big SIS and I think this is great news. We deal with a lot of nightly CSV files and it's awful. I'm hoping we take a look at working with Clever in the future.
I work with several schools as part of my volunteer work. And while it's a neat idea, but it is an EdTech startup that doesn't understand the legalities of school data. In the 49 states that Clever isn't sitting with servers in using them would be illegal.
In most states you couldn't store data on third parties servers with out consent from the kids parents.
Using Cloud Offerings just isn't permissible in most places because of the legalities. Clever would need a lot more than $10M to change all the necessary Federal, State, County, City, laws.
IANAL, but to me that reads like it specifically gives permission of what Clever is doing.
FERPA allows schools to disclose those records, without consent, to the following parties or under the following conditions (34 CFR § 99.31):
...
- Organizations conducting certain studies for or on behalf of the school;
- Accrediting organizations;
And additionally:
Schools may disclose, without consent, "directory" information such as a student's name, address, telephone number, date and place of birth, honors and awards, and dates of attendance.
I believe this is the why our Armed Forces recruiters often have the names, addresses and phone numbers of our graduating seniors every year. It's usually up to the school administrators to release this information upon request, and most do. Private schools do not have this issue.
It is an off premise, out of state, third party, Internet based solution.
Having worked with a lot of schools you can't even do this for Backups of data legally. eMail through Google, or Microsoft technically can get you in trouble if you use it for the Faculty.
Basically Privacy of Minors trumps convenience for IT
As a parent it's frustrating that my children's marks aren't accessible behind some sort of API. We have a web interface that we can use (which I guess is way way better than what was there when I was a kid), but I'd like to have my cake and eat it too :).
Getting API access to the system as a parent is hard to impossible. The vendor's site is geared towards selling to schools and supporting them.
You're right - Clever isn't built for your use case today - but it is one we'd love to support down the road.
In the meantime, you might want to take a look at the Dept of Ed's "MyData" initiative (http://www.ed.gov/edblogs/technology/mydata/). It's addressing your need pretty closely (although not with an API).
To the best of my understanding, Clever provides access to read-only data from the SIS. It does NOT provide a mechanism for education vendors to write data back into the SIS (an extremely important aspect of the problem in this ecosystem).
While the SIS stores core student data, there is a lot of missing functionality that could be supplemented well by products specializing in a particular niche (eg school lunch tracking, alerting, progress reporting, special education documentation, medicaid reimbursement, etc). However, schools feel unable to use these products since SISes generally disallow information write-back, arguing that accepting data from 3rd party vendors makes the database unstable and violates their end-user license agreement with the district.
Clever has helped with the easy problem, but the harder one is no closer to being solved.
Agreed. We have plenty of examples of services which dump data out of a SIS and then run custom scripts to organise it for this use or that, from putting accounts into AD to creating a census or students ids for state. All been done. There are other businesses like StudentNet and GroupCall which are doing much of the same thing for cloud Identity as a Service. Some of these guys can offer the addition of real identify matching services and the tracking of students across schools.
I applaud Clever's effort, but a superior solution to this problem is an industry standard, open interface. The market may be too fragmented for something like this to get off the ground, but it is sorely needed, and putting all the eggs in Clever's basket is not the answer.
You would probably be right if you argued that Clever solves an issue of having to re-create the "integration wheel" for every implementation, and so saves money in the short run. However, if Clever is successful, they will be a gatekeeper, and could demand significant fees from software vendors, possibly resulting in higher prices for schools.
As someone who works as a school with a few SISes and LMSes around, would it be possible for me to use clever to integrate my existing systems and save headache? We're currently knee deep in Moodle, PowerSchool, SchoolAdmin, Active Directory, Google Apps, and even have some Access databases floating around.
this seems like the type of thing teacher's unions would squash/render useless quickly. Anything that tracks data as a function of teacher performance would not be allowed, severly limiting the usefulness of the software. I HOPE HOPE HOPE I am wrong, can anyone explain to me why I am wrong?
We get love from teachers all the time at Clever (which, as a former teacher, makes me incredibly delighted).
Schools are using more and more technology (see http://edsurge.com/ for some examples), but often the burden of tech falls to the teacher. I remember burning the midnight oil manually setting up class rosters in MasteryConnect as a teacher, and fighting "roster rot" as students switched in and out of my class over the course of the school year.
With Clever, teachers get to focus on using the tool with their students, instead of managing data. They love it!
Clever is simply replacing the existing processor of schools having to coerce CSVs and other horrible formats and them them off (over email sometimes) every time data changes.
Schools may or may not buys apps that help determine teacher performance. Clever may or may not be used for moving the data. However regardless teacher unions not be effected differently with Clever as opposed to without.
Ignorant question maybe, is Clever going to integrate into LMS, ala Canvas, Blackboard? Do they relate in any way? I imagine it could enhance the LMS/port too the systems?
Interesting I have not seen any mention of InBloom - since they are both a standard API for School, and unlike Clever, an open standard. And they already interoperate with SIF.
Huh? SIF used to be complex, but now its simple.
It uses the same approach as Clever http[s]://<hostname>/<SIFObject Name>s[/{id}|<SIF Object Name>]. Thats very similar to Clever. So how can it be bloated, or maybe your not experienced with SIF? Which NSIP.edu.au can help you with.
try http://sif.dd.com.au/SIFDirectRest/sif/v2_5/objects/au/v1_3/....
I think you'll find that's SIF 3. I think that last time we spoke there was only one SIF 3 deployment around, and that was a pilot. All production instances are SIF 2 - or has that changed recently?
As I've said previously - I quite like the SIF data model, but I'm not keen on the SIF 2 programming model (to be fair - as many have said: it's pretty old software now). The SIF 3 programming model is a lot better.
Hey
What a laugh - to meet you on here. Yes my comments were about SIF 3.x. Now that said the best thing that happens with SIF is that schools and Edu Authorities get their Data into order - so it can be used properly externally - WHILE - it remains under their control. So this means ALL the SIF 2.x projects can migrate to SIF 3.x with a update to the software (as I pointed to its on GetHub) - but they dont have to change the data, the business events, their authorisation etc. So SIF 3.x bring both a low entry option for those wanting to share there data and a migration path for those existing.
I have a full online course in SIF 3.x and the Open Source Framework if you want to learn more.
Working with their API was really a delight, and I certainly have experience with some less than enjoyable services. Apparently public school IT systems are notoriously a pain in the neck to work with, but Clever just abstracts all of that out so you don't have to worry about it. Clever's development team was also very competent and professional. They seemed to really know their stuff and went out of their way to help us be successful. Assuming they take proactive steps to protect teacher and student personal data I wish them all the success in the world!