Clever expanded through Florida pretty rapidly as I was working with them earlier this year. I already wrote about my great experience with them at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6856714, but again I wish them the best of luck because I've seen their potential to get in a position as a platform to really do some revolutionary stuff to improve the way we educate our children.
Is this for k12 only or are you planning this for higher ed? @kipinhall, we are pivoting towards professor centric app, so having the access to student info would be great.
we can talk more if you're interested, ping me @agileseeker
Clever is great. I've had the pleasure of working with them on behalf of some clients. Their company and API is a breath of fresh air in a space that has historically been very complicated and messy.
I would love to see a Clever in the finance space...requisitions, invoices, purchase orders and the like.
I do foresee a problem with Clever. Their API is almost too simple. It would be trivial for a school ERP provider to set up a 'Clever compatible' API (since an API cannot be copyrighted) and either undercut the price or just offer it for free to education software vendors to get that nice demo room 'We are compatible with over x many applications for students, teachers, parents and administrators!'
I hope that doesn't happen but the threat does seem to be there.
This is a perfect example of an "unsexy problem" that needed to be solved. With so many people building education apps, it's great that someone decided to take the time to work out some of the unsexy underlying issues in the space that were slowing the pace of innovation. Standardizing and surfacing educational data may not be the sexiest work, but it can spur the pace of innovation across the entire domain.
This is great, if....the school software vendors adopt it as a standard and allow their systems to be Clever-enabled.
I work for a large school district and a large majority of our vendor solutions come with their own proprietary, locked-down technologies. When queried, some of these vendors see the writing on the wall and say they are working on integrating with Clever while others keep their heads stuck in the sand while counting their millions of taxpayer dollars spent on overly-complex, un-flexible and un-interoperable solutions.
Great idea! I believe that teachers feel like data is mostly about grading them and their students, and not about improving the educational experience. Some "Get it" but most either lack the tools, the support, or the mindset.
The logistics behind keeping track of 100+ students a trimester can become daunting. Most tools available to teachers are wanton.
Then throw in classes with 600+ students requiring multiple teachers. Trying to align fairness (rubrics), plagiarism (tools like Turn-it-in) and the uniqueness of teaching style is difficult.
We'll, I think it is more about teachers being overloaded with the minutiae of data that causes them to lose focus of the bigger picture (education). Actually, in my opinion, education has lost focus on the bigger picture of education and may have never really had it.
> Actually, in my opinion, education has lost focus on the bigger picture of education and may have never really had it.
This. Solutions like these are good in that they'll help schools get the space they need to be able to consider good reform, but said reform isn't a conversation that Americans seem capable of having.
My wife and brother are both teachers. While the systems that they use are far from "joyful", the issues being portrayed from the teacher perspective are being overblown. Perhaps the administration has bigger issues?
"The different vendors pay Clever, and Clever offers the service to schools for free."
This is the sole reason this will never work. I've been in education and developing education software for well over a decade now, and no one I know (vendors) want a single provider monopolizing the game in this way. In the UK at least, we (vendors) are struggling to remove the strangle hold of the monopolizing few; namely Capita and Serco.
But all that said, I do wish you the best and hope you find some solution that works. Interoperability of school data/systems is a giant PITA, which I've spent way to much of my life on.
