teachers report just getting their class logged in to
an app takes 25% of class time on average
Clever improves both efficiency and security dramatically.
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.
I have developed and support a language portfolio system - I was on site at a high school giving support for one period. I was shocked at how lax most of the students were (well... maybe not) but 25-30% of the students couldn't remember a username/password, even ones they created themselves. In a 45 minute period, 25 minutes were spent giving about a dozen or so students their username/password combos (I was doing manual resets on site to speed the process). It was insane, but I don't see many ways of making it better, short of tying in with edmodo or something similar (maybe clever? but I have no budget for this).
In general, "boot up time" for most students was usually fast, but the problem is that the edge cases (students who forgot their password, typed the wrong URL, didn't follow instructions properly, had a technical error) required individual attention, and would quickly eat up time. Many of these problems came from sending students to a web site they hadn't used before, or logging into a service they didn't use often.
I don't work for Clever (I'd disclaim it if I did. I currently work for a different educational tech company) but I can definitely see how a single sign-on for everything would be helpful to teachers.
Fax and email are generally considered much less secure means of transmission than an authenticated HTTPS api. SMTP is generally an unencrypted protocol, for example.