Dive Brief:

• The platform, which the company reports is now used by 12 million people, is a Learning Management System (LMS) that focuses on personalized learning and collaboration mainly for K-12 education.
• Schoology "provides a cloud and mobile platform that allows teachers to manage student grades, develop and deliver curricula, and collaborate online with peer teachers, students, counselors, and parents," the company says. 
• In a press release, CEO Jeremy Friedman said "We built the first education cloud that allowed educators and students to collaborate and connect all digital resources on one intuitive platform."

Dive Insight:

The use of learning management systems like that offered by Schoology continues to grow, with Schoology leading the way in terms of the reach and speed of its expansion. The company also recently announced a new partnership with the troubled Los Angeles Unified school district, in which the LMS will be used to track student performance as well as personalize curriculum. Other tech initiatives in the district, like the 1:1 iPad initiative, have failed and resulted in criminal investigations.

In addition to ramping up distribution of its ed tech products, Schoology will use the new funding "to make product engineering investments to increase the scope and power of its education cloud, which connects the people, content, data, and systems that fuel education," the company said.

Last week at Educause 2015, Schoology CEO Friedman announced the company's entry into the higher ed market.

Friedman says a focus on collaboration from the start gives it an advantage over legacy LMSes. Among its most notable features: the ability for faculty to see students' workloads across all of their courses when assigning work or to look at students' mastery levels of a concept, as well as groups in which faculty can share instructional resources across their department or campus.