In an effort to bring more tech to the education sector, Schoology snags funding for expansion

April 16, 2012

By Krystal Peak

Schoology, a cloud-based learning management system for schools, just announced its $6 million Series B round of funding. The round, led by FirstMark Capital, includes funding from existing investor Meakem Becker Venture Capital. This brings the New York-based startup’s total funding to $9.3 million.

Schoology is in a similar space as services like BlackBoard and Edmodo where it is creating a collaborative learning platform to help teachers and students share information and projects online and in real-time. The service has both free and fee models — the free version is easy for one teacher to set up for his or her class and the paid version is created so that a school or district can get the whole teacher/student base online.

Schoology allows teachers to create their classroom online and invite their students, using unique access codes, then everyone can feel free to post work, questions and collaborate on projects. Most colleges currently use online platforms to post curriculum, questions and project details to make the information available all the time, from anywhere — with the added perk of saving money since they don’t have to print the direction pages — but now primary and secondary schools are seeing the benefit of online forums where students and parents can easily contact the teacher and stay updates on classroom activities.

As more students at younger and younger ages have an understanding and access to digital content and online platforms, this option has become a viable supplement to learning in the classroom. And with more schools adopting digital textbooks, the need for further online communication is obvious.

Currently, Schoology has nearly one million users on the platform, in 18,000 schools.

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