COVER STORY
Schoology team (left to right): Timothy Trinidad, Bill Kindler, Jeremy Friedman, and Ryan Hwang
SCHOOL DAZE Innovation Transforms Collaborative Education While at WashU, Timothy Trinidad, BSBA ’09/BSAS ’09, Ryan Hwang, BSBA ’09, and Jeremy Friedman, AB ’09, thought they had invented a way to make learning easier for students, parents, administrators, and teachers. Unfortunately, teachers hated it. As freshmen, the trio originally built Schoology—a social media–based learning platform—as a class project to streamline their own education. During their college career, it evolved into a platform where students could easily communicate and collaborate, using familiar tools such as mobile devices, texting, and Facebook-like social networking. The pushback started soon after Schoology launched commercially in 2008, mostly to high school students. “We started getting emails from teachers saying our product was helping students essentially cheat,” said Friedman, Schoology’s CEO. Not only that, but as Schoology launched, educators were skeptical of Facebook-like platforms that could encourage time wasting, or worse, online bullying.
“ They were an incredibly focused and resilient team.” —Cliff Holekamp
The founders spent a year listening to St. Louis–area teachers and incorporating solutions into the next version. Now, Schoology is a full-fledged “learning management system” that fosters collaboration and helps teachers manage schedules, assignments, and grading. It also provides metrics for administrators and allows parents to monitor progress—all in an environment familiar to digital natives. Not only do teachers now endorse it, Schoology customers include more than 1,000 universities, colleges, and K–12 school districts— that’s more than 12 million users in more than 130 countries. In October, Schoology signed a contract with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the country’s second-largest public school district, with more than 1,000 schools and approximately 640,000 students.
14 OLIN BUSINESS SCHOOL