Our Mission at Edlink

by Dakota Gordon, Amanda Goodson

Our mission at Edlink is to improve the quality of and access to education through the use of technology.

Obviously, there are lots of organizations that are touching this area of work, and there are lots of ways we could go about working toward this mission.

There are 3 primary ways we're focused on:

  1. Building a broader picture of a student's education experience.
  2. Making educational technology easier to use.
  3. Building software people can rely on.

We’ll expand on these 3 objectives, how we arrived at them, and how we'll know we've achieved said objectives.

If you want to read more about the progress we've made toward our mission in our first year of operation (despite COVID) check out this post:

Edlink’s First Birthday 🎉
This year has certainly been an interesting time in human history. In this piece, we look back on the struggles and triumphs of Edlink’s first year.
Dakota GordonEdlink Community

1.Building a broader picture of a student's education experience.

We envision a world in which the story of a student's educational experience can be summarized and/or visualized cleanly and simply. This way, anyone involved in that student's development can quickly and effectively meet that student where they are.

As the edtech industry continues to evolve, we have no doubt that the traditional education model will continue to evolve as well. Regardless of the education method, allowing the educator (be it a human, program, or AI) to visualize and understand the entire picture of the learner's experience will be imperative.

For Edlink this starts by making it possible for every source of data about a student to be connected to one repository. It also means building a platform that organizes, enriches, transforms, and ultimately produces a digestible story that is actionable for the educator.

2.Making educational technology easier to use.

In the wake of a consolidating edtech market and ever-evolving technology, there are SO many brands, platforms, standards, and methods attempting to solve a technical or pedagogical problem in their own *special* way with limited access to tech talent. We work to make interoperability possible for all by building scaleable and invisible tools that make it easy to use and navigate the complicated edtech landscape.

As more and more companies are investing in making technology core to their unique value proposition, and despite the fact that there are more software engineers per capita than ever before, educational institutions and edtech companies still struggle to hire great tech talent. Why? Well, great tech talent is expensive and each of these organizations is competing against the Metas, Amazons, Spotifys, and Googles of the world (when it comes to hiring).

And, even when an organization does snag a solid developer, the company is at risk of losing that person to a lurking recruiter with a short deadline and a big budget.

So, faced with high churn and low choice, educational institutions and edtech companies are often left with piecemeal-built software, spaghetti code, and huge technical debt.

Who ultimately pays the price for this? The learner.

We're working to make it possible for non-technical and semi-technical talent to support technical products and solutions. We build tools for our clients' operational teams that make it possible for non-technical staff to easily set up, manage, and troubleshoot integrations.

Our tools do and will give power back to school administrators to be thorough and knowledgeable stewards of the very sensitive data that they're entrusted with.

We eliminate the need for guesswork from teachers and students when it comes to accessing, completing, and assessing digital coursework.

Our focused support model means that our clients have timely technical support when they need it. Their users (students, teachers, and admins) have help at their fingertips when and where they need it.

Finally, we believe that we don't have to be the center of the universe for educational institutions and learners. We're happy to quietly power the piping between edtech applications without inserting our brand unnecessarily.

3.Building software that people can rely on.

If we're going to boldly put ourselves in between edtech apps and the learners they serve, it's imperative that we're 1) up and 2) secure.

We strive to maintain 99.99% uptime.

Distributed teams give rise to more opportunities for security vulnerabilities. Each of our 14 employees works in our Austin office. All employees do mandatory security awareness training and undergo background checks.

Our engineers are all up to date on industry-standard security practices and proactively perform code reviews to find vulnerabilities.

We don't push breaking changes. We improve our product thoughtfully so that it remains familiar enough to those who rely on it, and continues to work as expected (albeit, hopefully, better).

We know we have a long and hard road ahead of us but one thing our whole team has in common is that we like solving hard and meaningful problems. We're up for the challenge!

If you’re interested to learn more about Edlink’s Unified API, here’re other articles we’ve written:

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