Clever (YC S12) Launches A Twilio For Educational Data | Hacker News Reader

Clever (YC S12) Launches A Twilio For Educational Data

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95 pointstemplaedhel22 comments

We built Clever because we realized that integration with legacy school systems was serious overhead for anyone building cool educational software. If you've run into this problem personally, we'd love to meet you.

Our API docs are at: http://getclever.com/developers/docs

I've been integrating Clever into my project and it's been really nice to work with.

Slick API and really easy to get up and running!

Everything listed on your site is for K12 - any plans to support higher ed packages?

We're currently K-12 only. Higher Ed is something we'd love to do, but there's a lot to do in K-12 first.

There is definitely a need for something like this. I have worked with SIS's in the past and they're awful. I thought SIF might be the answer, but it was not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_Interoperability_Framew...

If this leads to http://www.blackboard.com/ disappearing, or being updated, then I thank you.

It's this years school MIS that claims not to be an MIS.... The last one was Instructure Canvas. The problem isn't a technical problem yet companies try to solve it with a new piece of technology.

The problem is two fold:

1) Legacy MIS' are a nightmare to migrate from. Legacy MIS' have horrible tie ins and proprietary data storage. Clever isn't open source. So despite it having an API the software is still proprietary. Clever doesn't solve this problem. Getting your data out of the legacy MIS will still be a nightmare and the resources required to move data from each MIS available in the market at the moment will be extremely costly.

2) Training to use a new MIS often outweighs the cost of the software itself. Because the training costs are so high any monetary saving from moving to lower cost MIS' is canceled out.

Clever isn't what the market needs. Y-Combinator doesn't have the resources to compete w/ Capita/Pearson/RM/Serco just to name the leaders in the UK market. Imho it is a naive effort unless they are going to sink a lot of resources in.

I do wish Clever the best of look but Y-Comb should know that this is a really mature market place and making software that's main pitch is "REAL TIME LEARNING" shows a complete misunderstanding of the market.

Thanks for the feedback. Just so you know, we're not creating an MIS or SIS, so we're not trying to do either (1) or (2).

> It's this years school MIS that claims not to be an MIS.

it seems like you are claiming not to be an MIS!?!

It seems that you're saying "Startup X shouldn't compete with market owners Y because companies Y own the market", which is pretty ludicrous.

From what I understand, Clever makes migration from MIS less suck. And it gives developers opportunity to hook up to existing student/teacher data, which is pretty cool. Previously, most of the educators were using export/import tools to get student lists into the third party apps, which led to a lot of data duplication.

I don't think "a Twilio for educational data" does this product justice. It sounds more like the missing API for every schools' internal data systems, and it's a great idea.

I don't get why they are referring to this as a Twilio for x either; it seems like they're just saying that it is an API that abstracts away some things, which quite a few do.

Just last week I met someone from Code for America where they talked about creating an API for working with local governments. This seems like an education version of that. (Although perhaps Code for America isn't famous enough yet to use it as a comparison in a TechCrunch article.)

Edit: The reason why I don't think Twilio is all that unique for making that comparison is you could call it the "HopStop for schools" (since HopStop allows you to get mass transit directions without having to interface with each bus company, subway system, etc.) or the "Singly for schools" since it allows you to abstract away Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, LinkedIn, etc. I suppose that Twilio just has better branding, though.

Edit2: Code for America seems like a more direct comparison (but perhaps more obscure and not as suitable for marketing purposes) since it involves creating an API for programmers to use to connect with government institutions that use a diverse set of typically hard-to-interact-with-programmatically software.

If you want to build an app that uses voice/SMS, but don't want to deal with a bunch of complex telecom systems, you use Twilio.

If you want to build an app that needs student data, but don't want to deal with a bunch of complex student data systems, you should use Clever!

That said, I love the grandparent's description of what we do.

As an ed-tech cofounder at a company that needs data like this, this is exciting. You guys are YC backed and from all appearances you'll be in direct competition with the Imagine K12 backed LearnSprout http://learnsprout.com/ . It's exciting in that clearly smart people are working on this problem and I hope the competition pushes both companies to make great products.

What are some example use cases for an API like this? Perhaps you could add a page like Twilios How To's (while we're making the comparison).

the doc page is beautiful!!

http://swagger.wordnik.com/

Not just big data, but big data standardization.

I sell an educational product where teachers have to enter all their students into my system, and some have hundreds of students. Unfortunately, it looks like I must wait until Clever has signed up many schools before this is useful to me. Unlike Twilio which is useful to developers out of the box, this seems to have a marketplace challenge.

If you have entire schools or districts signing up for your product, Clever is a great fit. We build co-branded signup forms for developers like yourselves, which make the account setup process dead simple for schools.

Sending you an email now!

Will this integrate with schools' registration systems (add class, drop class, is-class-full, etc?). When I was in school I made some decent college cash with something I built called "Classgrabber" that registered for hard-to-get classes automatically. I had to write a registration "bot" that acted like the web browser. With an API, it would have been much easier, and more open to innovation. The school's response? They outlawed Classgrabber, but it didn't stop people from using it (after all, they needed to get their classes).

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