The idea of personalized learning reaches an “inflection point” today as PowerSchool, a leading provider of student information systems (SIS), completes the acquisition of Schoology, a leading K-12 learning management system (LMS). In an interview with Tech&Learning on Friday, PowerSchool CEO Hardeep Gulati and Schoology CEO and Co-Founder Jeremy Friedman discussed how the merger will give school administration, faculty, and parents more features and functions to manage student progress without disrupting their current workflow, instead making it more efficient.
Schoology’s LMS will continue to function as a distinct product within PowerSchool Unified Classroom and will receive up to $100 million in research and development funding to deliver the current roadmap and new innovations. “In fact, the combination of resources will give customers even more customer support,” says Gulati, “This addition will all be part of the natural upgrade process.”
The company’s combined technologies are intended to enhance the ability of districts and educators too:
• Centralize key aspects of learning to get a complete view of every student, giving teachers all of the tools they need in one unified solution
• Embed formative assessments to allow real-time feedback and adaptation of individual learning plans
• Empower teachers with their own professional learning based on students’ instructional needs
• Put parents, teachers, and students on the same team with one source of real-time collaboration and communication
• Develop personal learning paths based on specific student needs and information across student information system (SIS), learning, assessment, special education, and teacher professional development enabling them to learn in their own way based on their learning styles
Also announced today are plans for simplified workflows between Schoology and PowerSchool’s existing core solutions. The company will also continue to support the broader education technology ecosystem through open standards-based and out-of-the-box integrations with all SIS platforms, Google, Microsoft, and other third-party education tools, as well as providing more robust benchmark and summative assessment with PowerSchool Performance Matters, special education, and gradebook tools. PowerSchool is also committed to supporting industry-leading open standards, such as OneRoster and LTI from the IMS Global Learning Consortium and Ed-Fi.
“Our customers have been telling us they are excited about our roadmap and have been asking us to deliver a more unified solution with additional capabilities. We are excited to provide that to them on a much greater scale with the investment we get by being part of PowerSchool, and some of the additional capabilities that our customers wanted will become a reality,” says Friedman.
