GlobalScholar

GlobalScholar
Private
Industry education software
Founded December 2006 (2006-12)
Headquarters Bellevue, Washington (United States) Chennai , Tamil Nadu (India)
Key people
 Kal Raman (Founder, Chairman and CEO); Thomas Boysen (Chief Learning Officer);
Number of employees
 ~330 (December 2010)
Website www.globalscholar.com

GlobalScholar was an operating unit of Scantron based in Bellevue, Washington that developed, manufactured, licensed, and supported a wide range of products and services related to education. This included products such as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software solution, Pinnacle Suite, which supported all aspects of managing education at K-12 schools, including a gradebook, learning management system (LMS), and teacher development, analytics and online learning.

GlobalScholar.com was the company's on-demand collaboration platform for tutors, parents, and students. Parents and students could find pre-screened tutors on a variety of subjects and school levels, and pay for one-time homework help or engage in ongoing tutoring sessions. The sessions occurred on GlobalScholar’s website, which provides an online whiteboard, audio/video IM, archiving, and billing.[1]

History

GlobalScholar, formally known as InfiLearn, was founded in December 2006 by Kal Raman, a former drugstore.com chief executive and Amazon.com senior vice president.[2] The company has grown to about 250 people in March 2008, roughly half in the US (Bellevue, WA and Greeley, CO) and the rest in Chennai, India.[3][4]

In January 2008, GlobalScholar launched two new services, SchoolFinder and CollegeFinder; two new websites dedicated to parents and students to discover and learn more about their current and future schools.

GlobalScholar.com acquired Central Data Corporation's[5] adaptable learning and educational scaffold assets along with the GlobalScholar name in 2007, using these as the baseline for the initial InfilLearn product. GlobalScholar.com made a strategic decision on January 31, 2008, to acquire Excelsior Software to expand the solutions it offered school districts and in order to offer Excelsior’s many loyal customers an even broader collection of educational services, leveraging the patented scaffolding structures developed by Central Data Corporation.

In October 2013 Scantron formally retired the GlobalScholar brand and stopped development and support on several products.

Funding

The company secured $27 million in round B funding on January 31, 2008 from existing investors Ignition Partners and Knowledge Universe Education. This was on top of a previously undisclosed $15.5 Million of Round A funding the company raised early 2007. The funding included additional investments from Knowledge Universe Education, a leading global education company; Ignition Partners, a premier venture capital firm; and an added investment from Peter Neupert, an existing board member;[6][7] Excelsior Software, with long-standing relationships in the education community, was also acquired.[8][9]

Products

The company's Pinnacle Suite combined seven modules to provide end-to-end management of student data and instructional resources. Specifically, Pinnacle Suite included a standards-based gradebook; tools to help educators create, manage and align instructional content, assessments, curriculum, standards, and supplemental resources; and a platform to support continuous professional development for teachers.

Services

GlobalScholar.com offered a unique online education platform, where parents and students can connect with tutors/educators who provide one-on-one tutoring, homework help or self-paced learning. The platform could also be used by schools and school districts to enable teachers and administrators to more efficiently and effectively create, manage and align content, assessments, curriculum, standards and supplemental learning.[10][11]

In addition to GlobalScholar, the company also launched two other Websites in January 2008. SchoolFinder pulled together relevant information for elementary and high schools and let parents compare one school against another. CollegeFinder did the same for colleges, pulling in rankings from U.S. News & World Report and the Princeton Review.[12]

References

External links

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