LearnSprout, a universal application programming interface (API) for K-12 education has registered more than 3,300 schools for its new Dashboard product. The company was selected to participate in the LAUNCHedu competition at SXSWedu and advanced to the semifinal round where it made the announcement. LearnSprout is part of the budding New York startup technology scene and first demonstrated its dashboard at the SIIA Innovation Incubator contest. Since then, the company has been working with a handful of school districts to develop the product.
LearnSprout Dashboard uses the company’s Connect API to reference live data directly from a school or district’s student information system and converts the raw data into simple, easy to read charts and graphs. It is free to schools and districts and requires only a few minutes to set up.
According to Frank Chien, CEO of LearnSprout, “we wanted to avoid asking schools to pay because we understand how limited budgets are and how arduous the approval process can be. LearnSprout earns its revenue from developer partners who depend on the LearnSprout Connect API to integrate their software with a school or district’s SIS.”
Essentially, LearnSprout is designed to make student data in K-12 schools more transparent and easier to use for decision making and gaining insight about student populations. The offering is supported by other civic development organizations like Code for America and hopes to continue building on developer relationships to provide better data for schools.
With the dashboard school officials will be able to see real-time data and performance statistics about student populations in an easy to read chart format. Counselors and administrators can use this information to identify at-risk populations more readily through an integration with a school’s existing systems rather than learning a new product.
LearnSprout Dashboard is currently finishing its private Beta and will be starting a phased roll-out in April. Schools can sign up for the dashboard now. So far, the 3,300 schools on the system come from across the country and Chien says there is still significant pent up demand for data organization tools targeted to education.