
A Clever Way to Measure How Students Actually Use Edtech - brettcvz
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-01-17-a-clever-way-to-measure-how-students-actually-use-edtech-and-whether-it-works
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2arrs2ells
Hey hacker news - I'm one of the founders of Clever & have been working on
Goals for the past year. I'd love to answer any questions you might have about
the product!

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moh_maya
Hello! Really exciting stuff. I've worked at the school and college level (now
working on blue collar skill development / training).

Am I correct in understanding that as of now, the teachers have to set the
goals individually for each student? Would the next step be analytics so that
the platform can predict / recommend specific goals for students based on
profiles that they or the educators can select?

Perhaps an "in the weeds" technical question, but are you using the tincan /
xAPI for tracking and integrating such data? Or some other custom development?

Thank you! :)

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2arrs2ells
For launch, we built our own API. It's very simple. Post a JSON list of
students with two attributes - the cumulative time they've spent on the
program, and the cumulative "progress" they've made ("progress" metrics vary
from application to application - things like "books read" or "lessons
passed"). Full docs are here: [https://dev.clever.com/docs/goals-
api](https://dev.clever.com/docs/goals-api)

The reasons we didn't adopt tincan/xAPI (or the very similar IMS Caliper
standard) already are: 1\. Limited K-12 adoption 2\. Focus of existing
standards on event transmission from "dumb" data senders (e.g. stateless
content) to "smart" data hubs (e.g. LMSs that are the _only_ source of
analytics data). Our use case is different - as all of our data senders keep
track of their own analytics, and it's critical for Goals to stay consistent
with these systems.

But now that we've launched & have a bit more time, I'd love to support an
open standard. I'm optimistic that we can figure out a solution to #2, and
then I'd love to have Clever drive K-12 adoption. In fact, I had a great call
with IMS Global about this today :-)

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moh_maya
Thank you! :)

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bnj
Teacher and clever user here. I’ve been interested to watch the roadmap
unfold, I helped out with getting some schools on board in my district and
it’s really great to see features like this rolling out.

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2arrs2ells
Makes me so happy to see teachers on hacker news! (I was an 8th grade science
teacher & then tech director before Clever).

