Education Technology
PowerSchool | August 01, 2022
PowerSchool , the leading provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education in North America, today announced the Stanislaus County Office of Education (STANCOE) in Modesto, California, selected PowerSchool Unified Insights™ Student Essentials for enhanced data warehousing and analytics capabilities within STANCOE’s 25 school districts. The organization’s addition of Unified Insights Student Essentials will support STANCOE’s ongoing Global Data Project by providing an integrated data system capable of housing student data and information. Further, STANCOE’s use of Unified Insights Student Essentials will enable the organization to gain a greater perspective regarding learning trends in order to make more data-informed decisions.
“Our Instructional Support Services Data Team spent two years researching, reviewing, and discussing potential solutions that would fulfill both the warehousing and analytics needs of our county office and the districts we support aligned with the vision of their Cradle to Career Partnership program. “We desired a data warehouse that updated nightly via a direct connection with the student information system, paired with a dynamic analytics system to visually display data in a meaningful way. We are confident that by implementing PowerSchool’s Unified Insights solution with its excellent warehousing capability and the detailed dashboards that we have found our ideal solution.”
Rex Tschetter, Director II, School and District Support, Stanislaus County Office of Education
STANCOE’s goal in selecting Unified Insights Student Essentials was to gain the capacity to provide data analytics services that can empower school district leaders to monitor the impact of program decisions toward improving outcomes for students. With Unified Insights Student Essentials, STANCOE can pull role-specific dashboards for STANCOE’s partner districts and site leaders, grade-level teams, classroom teachers, and Differentiated Assistance support teams to inform decisions and support the ongoing monitoring of their impact.
By utilizing Unified Insights Student Essentials across multiple school districts, STANCOE is creating a framework that marries data from various sources into a unified system, allowing the data to be disaggregated at appropriate levels (e.g. by district, school, grade level, and student group). These capabilities increase the district’s capacity to base decisions on real-time data as they grapple with questions related to decisions such as course offerings, daily schedules, class sizes, curriculum implementation, student support services, and professional development offerings.
“The implementation of PowerSchool’s Unified Insights Student Essentials will be a unifying force leading to mutually beneficial partnerships between Stanislaus County school districts,” said Craig Greenseid, Chief Revenue Officer, PowerSchool. “Ensuring schools have the proper resources to make better data-informed decisions is one of our top priorities, and we look forward to seeing Stanislaus County utilize our Student Essentials platform to do just that.”
STANCOE is located in Stanislaus County, California where it serves over 110,000 students spread across 25 school districts, 16 charter schools, and seven schools operated by the county office itself. Its Global Data Project is a collaborative effort between multiple divisions within the county office, including Stanislaus Cradle to Career Partnerships, Child & Family Services, Educational Options, Special Education, and Instructional Support Services. The Stanislaus STATS (Strategic Targeted Assistance to Students) branch of the county-wide project focuses its work on supporting TK-12 education programs. Using a gradual phased approach, the Stanislaus STATS Project seeks to establish productive partnerships with districts across the county.
About PowerSchool
PowerSchool is the leading provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education in North America. Its mission is to power the education ecosystem with unified technology that helps educators and students realize their full potential, in their way. PowerSchool connects students, teachers, administrators, and parents, with the shared goal of improving student outcomes. From the office to the classroom to the home, it helps schools and districts efficiently manage state reporting and related compliance, special education, finance, human resources, talent, registration, attendance, funding, learning, instruction, grading, assessments and analytics in one unified platform. PowerSchool supports over 45 million students globally and more than 14,000 customers, including more than 90 of the top 100 districts by student enrollment in the United States, and sells solutions in more than 90 countries.
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Education Technology
Outschool | July 26, 2022
Promoted, which is the only company to unify search, feed, ads, and promotions for top marketplaces, announced today that Outschool has selected Promoted to optimize the performance and profitability of its education marketplace.
Outschool wanted to better match its classes with learners to increase search conversion rates, total GMV (gross merchandise value), and profitability. Outschool chose Promoted after weighing the costs and risks of building an order-of-magnitude greater infrastructure investment versus working with the experienced Promoted team to get a proven, real-time streaming data service with ML in place. Within a quarter, Promoted optimized Outschool search to increase conversion by about +11%, with more improvements planned for H2 2022.
“Promoted is able to measure and report on data in real-time on search for us and use machine learning to better match teachers and students so we can very effectively increase conversion rates and make our customers and users happy. “The founders have deep experience in search optimization as ad engineers from Facebook, Pinterest and Google, and we have found the technology extends and compounds our existing engineering investments in search and discovery to directly increase profitability at a reasonable cost.”
Kejia Zhu, Lead Product Manager, from Outschool
Promoted and Marketplaces
Right now, most large marketplaces have separate teams for ads, merchandising, search, and recommendations. They all work in separate departments and information is siloed. Even with expensive tech savvy engineers, these businesses do not have a unified data infrastructure that is measuring performance of everything in search feed, merchandising, and ads across the marketplace.
When ads, listings, promotions, and search aren’t optimized together, conversions are low, revenues decrease, and it becomes a death spiral as more ads and promotions are shown to compensate, further driving away users. Promoted is the only provider that offers a complete and comprehensive solution to fix this problem for e-commerce apps and marketplaces.
Promoted’s secret sauce is its ability to provide an entire measurement solution with a data service that measures and optimizes user engagement in real-time. Other ad tech or search vendors are measuring pieces with siloed data and/or only measuring ads, not giving marketplaces the complete picture.
How it Works
First, Promoted measures everything in its client’s app or marketplace, then they aggregate and join the data in real-time with reporting. Next, using AI-based data optimization, Promoted creates a complete picture of the data so they can predict conversion and clicks for the client’s search and feed.
Once Promoted has this complete picture of performance on a marketplace, it creates a “unified currency” for optimizing trade-offs between the optimal user experience in search and feed, seller experience using ads and promotions, and marketplace profitability versus growth.
“We are very excited to be working with Outschool and to so quickly increase conversions for its business,” said Andrew Yates, Co-Founder and CEO of Promoted. “Promoted gives top marketplaces and e-commerce companies one complete picture of how search, feed, ads and promotions are performing by measuring in real-time and then optimizing them using machine learning to increase conversions. By unifying this information, the entire marketplace works properly, and CFOs and COOs can set achievable goals for revenue and profitability.”
About Outschool
Outschool offers live online education experiences that connect real-life teachers with learners in small-group settings to explore everything from Minecraft, Pokemon and Cooking to Chemistry, Algebra and Literature. With over 100,000 online classes offered by teachers to learners around the globe, Outschool helps supplement what is often missing from a more traditional education. Outschool’s mission is to inspire kids to love learning by making education fun, social and self-directed. Classes on Outschool range from one-time enrichment lessons to semester-long core courses and weekly social clubs. Classes are offered across all subjects, and learners range from age 3 to 18.
About Promoted
Promoted is the only company to unify search, feed, ads, and promotions for top marketplaces like Outschool, Hipcamp, Teachers Pay Teachers, Snackpass, and other e-commerce unicorns. Promoted works by measuring everything in the marketplace using its real-time streaming data infrastructure. Then, Promoted maximizes conversions in search and feed through machine learning. Backed by Y Combinator, the company was founded by former ad engineers from Pinterest, Facebook, and Google.
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Education Technology
BSV Academy | March 15, 2022
BSV Academy, the online learning platform run by the Switzerland-based global industry organisation that works to advance business with the BSV blockchain, today announces the official launch of the Bitcoin Primitives: Merkle trees course.
Bitcoin Primitives: Merkle Trees is one of three short courses that aim to educate developers and those working in the blockchain industry about the mechanics of the original Bitcoin protocol which, now restored in BSV, can massively scale to support a powerful distributed data network. The other two Primitives courses cover hash functions and digital signatures.
While the four-hour short course is aimed at developers, it is a beginner-level course and requires no previous knowledge of the BSV blockchain. The Merkle Trees course comprises six chapters, each of which focuses on specific components of the Merkle tree data structure and its application in the BSV protocol. At the end of the course, students will have an understanding of what Merkle trees are, how they help the BSV blockchain to scale and what elements are involved in a standardised Merkle proof.
At the conclusion of the course and upon completion of the final assessment, a course certificate will also be presented to those who have demonstrated proficiency and understanding of the subject matter.
BSV Academy is an online education platform which offers academia-quality, university-style courses and learning materials in three distinct streams about BSV: Theory, Development and Infrastructure, in addition to several short courses covering specific concepts and content in more detail. Developed and run by the global industry organisation supporting the BSV blockchain, BSV Academy has been created to make learning about use of the Bitcoin protocol for a powerful distributed data network – as designed by Satoshi Nakamoto – accessible, accurate and understandable.
With the launch of the Merkle Trees content, there are now three short courses available on the BSV Academy platform, which accompany full length introductory courses across three main streams: Bitcoin Theory, Bitcoin Development and Bitcoin Infrastructure.
'Education is a key growth driver for the BSV ecosystem, and we are pleased to announce the launch of our Merkle Trees course on the BSV Academy, which will help students understand the fundamental concepts that power the unbounded scaling and transaction throughput of the BSV blockchain. Developing blockchain talent and the skills required to build on BSV is crucial to further its adoption and create new applications that address the needs of enterprise, governments and consumers.'
-Jimmy Nguyen, Founding President of the global organisation for the BSV blockchain
About Bitcoin Association for BSV
Bitcoin Association for BSV is the Switzerland-based global industry organisation that works to advance business on the Bitcoin SV (BSV) blockchain. It brings together essential components of the BSV ecosystem – enterprises, start-up ventures, developers, merchants, exchanges, service providers, blockchain transaction processors (miners), and others – working alongside them, as well as in a representative capacity, to drive further use of the BSV blockchain and uptake of the BSV digital currency. The Association works to build a regulation-friendly ecosystem that fosters lawful conduct while facilitating innovation using all aspects of Bitcoin technology. More than a digital currency and blockchain, Bitcoin is also a network protocol; just like Internet protocol, it is the foundational rule set for an entire data network. The Association supports use of the original Bitcoin protocol to operate the world's single blockchain on BSV.
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