About Essential Skills:
Essential Skills (ES) aims to make a difference in education by providing affordable, technology-based solutions that motivate students, build their confidence, and allow them to achieve success. The company didn't start as a business plan, but rather as an idea for an easier, more engaging, and more efficient way to teach basic skills. ES is more than an educational software publisher – developing 21st-century tools to engage, inspire, and educate students of all ages. With more than 70 titles and over 20,000 school customers later, ES programs are continuously developed by classroom teachers.
About the relationship:
ES knew its next step in product development had to be integrations – a feature to support learning institutions in hopes of becoming more marketable. However, because of the size of ES's development team and the newness of edtech integrations overall, ES was facing an uphill battle. The development team was split between updating current offerings, troubleshooting bugs that would pop up, and jumping into the newest project, integrations. Around this time ES's Mathew Brown received a tailored cold email from Edlink. With curiosity, he and Jamie Whitten met with Edlink to explore Edlink as an integration partner.
By building one integration to Edlink's Unified API, ES gains dozens of LMS, SIS, and IAM provider connections for needed features like SSO and rostering. Given ES’s compact development team, Edlink makes scaling ES's interoperability easier – saving hundreds of development hours for ES to fast forward its product development. Now supported with Edlink connections, ES is prepared to speed through its integration learning curve.
“We are too small to build for individualized LMS, SIS, and SSO systems ourselves [,and] we also don’t know how to support LTI-like systems on our end. The Edlink API is clean and allows me to use multiple languages (Node, PHP, Python) without relearning custom code for each.”
- Jamie Whitten, Full Stack Developer (MEAN) at Essential Skills
About Edlink:
Edlink is the fastest and easiest way to integrate your learning platform with school data systems. Working with Edlink's Unified API saves development teams headaches, gets operational teams to-market faster, and helps sales teams win more deals.
Edlink currently supports 75+ edtech companies and is currently working behind the scenes to help over 30 million students use their edtech products seamlessly with their school’s LMS, SIS, and identity management platform (like Clever, or ClassLink). We’re trusted to exchange sensitive data securely by edtech companies, school IT administrators, and district leaders in over 2,500 educational institutions, and growing.
To learn more about Essential Skills, visit www.essentialskills.com
To learn more about Edlink, visit ed.link.
