Not long ago, it was rare for a school district to work with more than a couple of hundred different edtech vendors. That number has exploded exponentially with the rapid growth of edtech since the pandemic. The average school district is now utilizing an average of 1,400 different edtech vendors. What was a problem then – copying PII a couple of hundred times using traditional rostering services – has become an insidious risk to every district now that they’re relying on these traditional rostering solutions to copy PII 1,403 times over. The way schools work with and share information with edtech vendors must change.
Where Is Your Data?
As a school administrator, answer this one question: Where is your student data being held today? In your Student Information System? Unfortunately, it’s not. Hundreds of vendors duplicate student data, some are district approved, and some are not. The habit of duplicating student data has become commonplace, allowing for increased ransomware attacks and even lawsuits. This rapid growth of edtech and the way PII is shared with them is the privacy problem that no one is talking about. Every time rostering data is copied over to a new edtech vendor, a school’s attack surface increases. It is only a matter of time before some employee in one of the 1,400 vendor organizations accidentally clicks a link that installs ransomware on their system and puts your school’s data at risk.
Beyond Rostering: Addressing the Rapid Growth of Edtech with Better Data Exchange
Districts are faced with daunting challenges as education evolves. Edtech is a mainstay in the classroom; it improves the education experience for students and teachers, provides essential data for decision-making to school leaders, and creates cost-saving efficiencies for every area of operations. But the rapid growth of edtech means there’s a lot more than just roster data that is often needed to gain those advantages. The more complex the data exchange process becomes, the more essential it is that 1,400 copies of that information aren’t disseminated. School Passport is revolutionizing data exchange for school districts, minimizing the surface area to attack with our cutting-edge technology that solves the problem that traditional rostering vendors have created.
What Does School Passport Do Differently?
Unlike traditional rostering services, School Passport is a platform that exchanges any data with any edtech product. We go beyond basic rostering to handle complex data exchanges to resolve any data challenge. School Passport keeps your student data safe while our robust API framework facilitates any use case. Authentication, personalization, and account creation are all made possible with School Passport; even handling complex cases like communication workflows, badging, and certification reunification. We empower all of these use cases while limiting the sharing of PII with vendors. Our API framework means vendors can easily adopt School Passport and participate in the anonymized data exchange without changes to their applications.
School Passport Is a Sophisticated Data Exchange Platform
School Passport has successfully integrated with over 30,000 schools, 500 higher ed institutions, and hundreds of edtech partners. Our strong adoption and support for open standards, such as OneRoster and LTI, solve data integration challenges at scale. Our tight integrations and strong relationships with over 37 Student Information Systems and hundreds of edtech companies allow for endless integration solutions. Our sophisticated platform offers readily available connectors for:
- Rostering
- Two-way grade sync
- LMS Integration with all the major LMS
- Combining multiple data sources
- SIS write-back
- Provisioning Google Workspace and Microsoft SDS
School Passport has enabled career-centric vendors like Coursera to easily integrate with schools and universities, allowing for a unified school ecosystem.
School Passport is a data exchange platform that exchanges any data with any edtech application, is easy to implement for schools and vendors, and eliminates the need to share school PII. Visit https://gg4l.com/learnmore/.
