PowerSchool Helping More Schools Use Remote Teaching Technology
Source: Sacramento Business Journal, Mark Anderson
Photo: PowerSchool CEO Hardeep Gulati. (Don Reid)
The rush by school districts across the country to offer online learning and connectivity between teachers and students has accelerated the adoption of Folsom-based PowerSchool’s technology.
PowerSchool provides schools with centralized and online administrative, management, reporting technology and analytics. And its recently acquired Schoology platform offers school districts cloud-based personalized teaching aids and remote learning technology.
“There has been an overnight shift” to online learning, PowerSchool CEO Hardeep Gulati told the Business Journal.
The Schoology learning platform has seen a 400% increase in usage by students and 1,000% increase in usage by parents, he said.
Some districts were more able to start distance learning than others, Gulati said. Some went from nearly no remote capabilities or online courses to suddenly using a host of resources through PowerSchool, including cloud-based offerings and access to YouTube, Zoom videoconferencing and other secure group experiences. The Schoology portal also allows students to collaborate and tutor each other via the cloud.
In the past, many districts have picked and chosen an application here or a technology there from the portfolio of PowerSchool offerings, said Ali Koper, a spokeswoman with PowerSchool.
The pandemic has forced more districts to make the leap to using many more offerings.
“The silver lining is that it will speed up the transition at school districts,” Gulati said.
“We had districts that did not have distance learning in place,” he said. Other customer districts had blended platforms, where they used some distance technology. From ramping up the districts that had blended platforms, the company in the past month has developed best practices to quickly onboard districts that started from nothing, Gulati said.
The company has learned a lot through this episode, and it has a lot more to learn to be a part of the solution for schools, he said.
“For many school districts, it was an overnight shift to assemble a distance learning program, and we have helped them,” Gulati said.
Many districts have a lengthy budget process, and for districts in immediate need, PowerSchool has brought them on board for free or reduced cost.
The company invests more than $100 million annually in research and development. It has not had to lay off any workers, Gulati said, but it has shifted the priorities of some employees.
Started in 1997, PowerSchool been bought and sold several times, starting with its acquisition by Apple Inc. in 2001. Most recently, PowerSchool was sold in 2016 by London-based educational publisher Pearson to private equity firm Vista Equity Partners.
Since the Vista acquisition, PowerSchool through developments of its own and through 10 acquisitions has created a comprehensive platform to help schools bring most of their functions online in a unified package that serves classrooms, administrators and teachers.
Its acquisition history is the primary reason PowerSchool was listed in the 2019 Inc. magazine fastest-growing companies list. According to Inc., PowerSchool had $361.1 million in 2018 revenue, an increase of 292% over three years.
Beyond the districts, one of the struggles in remote learning is the ability of students to get access to computers and internet connectivity at home.
“Equity and access are the most challenging aspects of this,” Gulati said.
About 400 of PowerSchool’s 2,400 employees had worked in its Folsom headquarters office until the end of March, when the company went fully remote, Gulati said. It was not a big transition for the company, where the majority of its employees historically have worked remotely.
As of the end of 2019, PowerSchool supported 75% of the school districts in the U.S. and Canada, representing 45 million students, Gulati said.
https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2020/04/15/powerschool-helping-more-schools-use-remote