4 ms·
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 re
by bradleyland 13y ago
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.
1: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_091.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_091.asp
- teddyh 13y ago> 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.
- bradleyland 13y agoSorry, you referred to them as an aggregator, so I assumed you meant that they would be aggregating this data and using it in other ways.
- coob 13y ago> There are no industry-wide standards for this, currently. There are but they suck. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharable_Content_Object_Reference_Model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharable_Content_Object_Referen...
- 2arrs2ells 13y agoSCORM'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/ http://tincanapi.com/). These standards were sponsored by the Department of Defense & haven't seen adoption in K-12 (that I'm aware of).
- bradleyland 13y agoThere'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.