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GlobalScholar’s Kal Raman Seeks to Build an Oracle for K-12 Schools

"I learned that education as a sector is about 20 years behind retail and finance in use of technology," Raman says. "There are thousands of problems technology could solve, but aren’t being solved."

The big idea at GlobalScholar http://www.globalscholar.com/ , from when it got started in October 2006, was to help make schools function more efficiently through information technology. He learned when he really started sizing up the K-12 educational software market that it was huge–with a global value of about $7.5 billion a year. The problem was that there were, and still are, hundreds of different proprietary software offerings for hundreds of different narrow niche products that schools use–online gradebooks, programs that evaluate teacher performance, and longitudinal data collection that tracks how a student progresses over time. The average school bought stuff from 14 different software vendors. Those programs don’t work together seamlessly, and school IT staff really can’t stitch them together in a coherent way.

Luke Timmerman

Full Story: http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/12/20/globalscholars-kal-raman-fresh-off-160m-deal-seeks-to-build-an-oracle-for-k-12-schools/

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