Dive Brief:
- K-12 assessment and learning analytics provider Renaissance Learning on Thursday announced it had acquired San Francisco-based UClass for an undisclosed amount.
- UClass has been described by some as a "Dropbox for Education," and its technology will help boost Renaissance's STAR assessment — a 20-minute adaptive exercise to identify what a student may or may not know in low-level literacy, math, and Spanish — by making it easier for instructors to identify the right material to address knowledge gaps, according to EdSurge.
- Renaissance Learning says that adding UClass's services to its portfolio will ultimately save teachers time, since UClass's resource library is already tagged according to various state standards. Additionally, educators can tag their own resources for the benefit of peers.
Dive Insight:
According to Renaissance's in-house research, teachers spend an average of around 7.5 hours per week planning and searching for worksheets and assignments, TechCrunch reports. The big benefit being pushed with this acquisition is that the database, combined with UClass' resources and tagging system, will save that time for educators. Even with the service being folded into Renaissance's platform, there are reportedly no plans to stop operating UClass on its own for current clients — at least not yet. It's obviously to Renaissance's benefit to bring those schools into the fold for its own platform in the long run.
When Renaissance was sold for $1.1 billion to Hellman & Friedman, a private equity firm, in March, the firm pledged to “help grow Renaissance’s impact globally through continued investment in products that make a difference in the classroom." This deal certainly seems like a step in that direction. UClass may have only just raised a $1 million seed round in August, but it does seem to have plenty of potential.
