
Clever (YC S12) Gets $30M to Become the Login Layer for Education Apps - sethbannon
http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/16/clever-30m-lightspeed/
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bsder
Um, is anybody _NOT_ overly happy about this?

I'm not happy to have yet another centralized login system. I'm not happy to
have yet another company collecting analytics. I'm especially not happy that
those analytics are about children.

I was going to slag startups about security, but, hell, big companies don't
bother either, so that would be unfair.

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2arrs2ells
Thanks for raising this issue. I'm one of the founders of Clever, a former
educator, & super privacy conscious. I'm really proud of the work we're doing
for a few big reasons:

1\. When schools adopt Clever, they often tell us about the way they were
setting up software previously. It's _always_ inefficient (i.e. teachers hand-
entering class lists every week), but all too often insecure (i.e. faxing
attendance sheets, or emailing XLS files to a support team). Clever improves
both efficiency and security dramatically.

2\. Without centralized login systems, teachers report just getting their
class logged in to an app takes 25% of class time on average. The friction of
using technology is preventing students from learning. Clever eliminates that
friction.

3\. Clever is a tool schools use to manage their applications. They manage
data sharing & own any data in Clever (our TOS & Privacy Policy make this very
clear).

Please let me know (dan@clever.com) if you have suggestions for how we can
improve privacy or security for students. It's our top priority & one of the
biggest reasons we raised this round.

~~~
mikegioia

        teachers report just getting their class logged in to
        an app takes 25% of class time on average
    

That sounds made-up to me. That would imply some classes spend upwards of 40%
of their time logging kids in to an app?

    
    
        Clever improves both efficiency and security dramatically.
    

How? Also how is faxing/emailing attendance sheets any less secure than
routing their precious data through your servers?

~~~
SystemOut
First off, I am not with Clever but I have spent a fair amount of time looking
at their platform.

Being in the industry, I think the 25% number is high. It is a significant
frustration especially in lower grades if kids have different
username/passwords for every education app they are using during their school
week. I think this is a pretty good idea and it helps. However as schools move
to Chromebooks more and more I do wonder if schools will push more for vendors
to just integrate directly with Google's login since all users have to have a
Google account to use the Chromebook. Maybe Clever supports this? I haven't
looked into it lately.

The way they improve efficiency is due to fact that schools will no longer
need to upload CSV files nightly to vendors servers to update their student
rosters. Many inner city schools have a very high degree of student transience
(meaning kids move schools a lot) and this is a huge pain to update across
multiple vendors every day. A lot of vendors support the upload of CSV files
to provide an updated list of student rosters. Imagine how much easier it is
for the schools if they don't have to do any of that or only have to integrate
with one vendor. I can't speak to the security side and how they improve that
really.

They do charge the vendors at the school level and for many vendors their fees
can really eat into their margins and so I still think you see a lot of
vendors relying on CSV files. Schools are used to doing this and so setting up
one more job to upload the same file every night is not a huge burden to them.

~~~
fixedd
Not to mention that every vendor has different formats.

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hashtree
First, congrats on the raising of funds!

Last time I spoke with higher ups at Clever, it was mentioned that deep
integrations were not on the roadmap (e.g. pushing into SISes like Infinite
Campus for things like health, attendance, grades, etc). Some of that has to
do with how the problem is being approached technically at Clever, IMO. While
tackling student logins and thin system integrations is cool, are there yet
plans to go deeper?

For a time, I had very seriously considered entering this particular space as
a competitor, as I am referred to do integrations, where Clever falls short,
for districts on an almost weekly basis (which I decline these days). As a
competitor, it was my intention to include extremely deep/bi-directional
integrations with all systems (including SISes, like Infinite Campus), purely
horizontally scaling infrastructure, process/data isolation (security and
privacy is a huge concern for districts), distributed processing so that data
never need to leave local district data centers, taking functional/stream
programming concepts to allow for fully customized integrations per-district
built on the same base for each directional system integration, mock
integrations for staff members to play with their rules, etc. It can all be
done on a technical front (I did on a per-district basis, many times), but I
eventually decided it wasn't a great fit for where I wanted to go in business.

I mention all this because I hope someone, perhaps you Clever (knowing you are
HNers), addresses this huge need by the districts. So much energy is being
spent on things that shouldn't be issues at all... It's a horrible joke that
districts have to spend energy on unified login systems, but it is also a joke
that moving grades/attendance back and forth between systems for state
reporting, for instance. It is not something teachers should have to spend
time on. Syncing of student accounts, teacher accounts, admin accounts,
enrollments for each, courses, sections, permissions, grades, attendance,
health, ILPs, RtI, etc.. it goes on and on. You have the funding and man-power
to pull it off, I'd love to see it.

~~~
hashtree
BTW, with deeper integrations... you open up some unique opportunities to
solve big problems for districts:

Done right, deep integrations mean you, in-effect, have a way to get to all
data within a district (data warehouses go for six to eight figures and
districts eat it up, as you know). The power of being able to get to data
district-wide... You have that obvious route for analytics and reporting now,
but what if you were to take the next step... ML/NLP/AI... you can do truly
interesting work now. Measure teacher effectiveness, dropout prediction well
before it occurs, academic achievement prediction to catch kids before
teachers can (because you see the whole picture), recommending interventions
that have worked for students in similar scenarios, etc. Now that's cool.

~~~
robbiemitchell
"Recommending interventions" is a piece of what Knewton does. But we don't
need PII or demographic data to do it. We are integrated with the digital
course materials (Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Cengage, etc.) and work
inside those products to provide real-time student recommendations, predictive
analytics for teachers (intervene ahead of time), and content insights for
publishers to change content or create more where it's needed most.

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schimmy_changa
I think many people might not realize how much education has changed since
they were in school (K-12) - there are now hundreds of educational apps
specializing in all parts of the curriculum.

It's crazy to organize (hence why Clever is loved by schools) but the
proliferation of apps is very useful for teachers to find the right tools for
them.

~~~
ZeroFries
How does this education ecosystem change in other developed countries? Do they
have the same abundance of apps and options? Does clever have any plans on
moving into these other countries (Canada, Europe, Australia)?

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schimmy_changa
hmm - I can't really speak about the differences (sorry!), and have to be lame
and punt your 'future plans' question to the quote from our CEO: “Our goal is
to help all schools, and that includes international as well,” Bosmeny told me

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greattypo
We’re also hiring. We have some extremely ambitious goals, and we need more
great engineers to hit them. Check us out at
[https://clever.com/about/jobs](https://clever.com/about/jobs) or let me know
if you'd like to learn more: dan.mccarthy@clever.com

~~~
23david
Awesome^3. Keep it up :-)

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sethbannon
Using technology to spur innovation in the education space is so easy to get
behind.

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jimbokun
So Clever is the App Store for education?

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rblatz
So what does this offer that a distributed system like shibboleth doesn't
offer?

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maxpain
anyone know the valuation?

