For anyone who has been following the furor over Twitter's moves to control it's network and infrastructure at the expense of the developers who gave it value (and it's logo!), Clever and LearnSprout should be concerning.<p>The idea is that School's can integrate their SIS system with Clever's network once, and then have "seamless" integrations with whatever tools operate on that network. This is "free of charge" to the schools.<p>However, the apps/tools that integrate with Clever must pay them.<p>It should be noted that Clever's data and API aren't based on any existing or proposed industry standard.<p>Schools are baited with the idea of a "free" integration. They'll end up paying for it in the long run, though, because those costs will be passed on for every application they use.<p>What's worse, they'll all be locked into this proprietary standard.<p>On the surface, this all sounds like a "Great Idea". At the end of the day, it's an attempt at a land grab to try and control the market for student data. Is that even a market that should exist in the first place? Are schools making the right long-term choice when they integrate with a tool such as Clever and LearnSprout, it if means being locked into a proprietary standard down the road?<p>This sounds exactly like what has happened with the "centralized network" problem we have with Twitter, FB, etc.--and it is.<p>Yes, the existing toolset in K12 is abysmal. Schools and their vendors should be looking to implement standards such as those offered by IMS in Higher Ed, rather than just adding another proprietary mouth in the trough--especially one that doesn't offer any actual learning tools.<p>If Clever and LearnSprout issued their data formats under an open license through a standards body, I'd be way more interested. That said, I'm glad to see any kind of shake-up in the Ed space.
Worth mentioning that Clever is now making a few key engineering hires.. if improving education through data sounds exciting, shoot me a note and say hello! Or check out <a href="https://getclever.com/about/jobs" rel="nofollow">https://getclever.com/about/jobs</a>
It's probably not important to them, as I'm not their target audience but I looked at their home page and their about page and that techcrunch article and still have no idea what they do.
I'd like to take a moment to point out how fantastically awesome Clever's API documentation[1] is.<p>Everyone with an API take note: examples in your favorite language of each API request with a demo API key already set up is how you get developers playing with your API. There was almost zero barrier to entry for me to get data from their API into a language I knew how to manipulate JSON objects with and muck around to my heart's content.<p>Note to Clever: perhaps go all the way to converting the response body to a JSON object in each language?<p>Edit: also, the "show/hide, collapse, expand" buttons are confusing. You only need two buttons that change their action depending on the current state ("collapse" becomes "expand" if the content is collapsed), and "show/hide" should be up by the `h2`s.<p>1. <a href="https://getclever.com/developers/docs" rel="nofollow">https://getclever.com/developers/docs</a>
I've played around with some of those proprietary (Pearson) school formats before, and they suck.<p>This is a world of change for school software development.
Wait a minute, is this taking private information about minors and, without guardian consent, using a proprietary API to give the information to private industry for-profit corporations?
Interesting approach. Not sure how you get over $10mm, as there are only so many LMS companies.<p>They must have a pretty good vision to attract the capital