Our team has been thinking a lot about AI. How is it going to affect teaching and learning? How is it going to change our own business? For a long time, we were not really sure (we still are not). But we have a high level of conviction about two truths:
- AI will help good people do more good.
- AI will help bad people do more bad.
AI For Better and For Worse
Like most teams in edtech, we use AI every day. It helps us explore new ideas and deliver products faster than ever. Schools and universities are undergoing an equivalent shift. We believe that AI will play an increasingly large role in student outcomes and that the best technologies will be the ones that can surface the right context about a student at the right time. There is likely no future where less data is shared between platforms.
At the same time, AI is also making it easier to create noise, mislead people, and introduce risk in ways that are not obvious. Phishing, ransomware, and cyberattacks are all on the rise. AI has made it faster and easier to launch sophisticated attacks.
This reality forced us to confront something about Edlink: our previous mission did not fully capture the role we play in the ecosystem. So we are clarifying it.
Our Mission
Edlink builds the infrastructure that helps great edtech products work better for schools, educators, and students.
We achieve that mission by building software that:
- Makes edtech more connected, useful, and actionable.
- Removes friction from building, adopting, and managing edtech.
- Makes edtech safer and more reliable.
Said differently: Edlink helps builders build, teachers teach, and learners learn by removing the technology barriers that get in the way.
Integrations are still core to what we do. Transforming messy data into useful context is still core to what we do. Our original mission statement is still available if you want the earlier framing.
What is changing is that we are being more explicit about security, observability, and operational trust. Those are an increasing part of the same story. The edtech ecosystem is getting more complicated, and we have an obligation to help.
What We Are Building Next
We already sit in the middle of a lot of this complexity. We work with vendors and with institutions. We see the integration challenges, the compliance friction, the security questionnaires, the implementation pain, and the gaps in visibility.
We want to create clarity for companies and build the guardrails and controls institutions need to operate safely. Some of this work is already live. All of it will continue to evolve.
Providing the Right Context at the Right Time
Expanding Our Data Model. We are adding more than two dozen new data types to the Unified API so developers can build richer, more useful products.
Public Data API. A more reliable way for the education ecosystem to reference schools, districts, universities, companies, and the relationships between them.
Stopping Cyber Threats
Credential Monitor. Helps Canvas administrators (and, eventually, administrators on other platforms) see which developer keys exist, which vendors they map to, and whether that access still needs to exist.
Audit Logs. Visibility into security events: what changed, who changed it, and what happened before an issue was caught.
Integration Security Tools. Secure and audit third-party integrations to LMS and SIS data sources, especially ones that are not provided through Edlink.
Establishing Operational Trust
Data Privacy Platform. Streamline data privacy and security agreements. Control who has access to what data, make sure things are deleted, check that vendors are in line with school policies, and make privacy and security reviews less frustrating for everyone involved.
Shipping Safer Infrastructure
API Request Radar. Detect suspicious API activity and risky access patterns, including after an account has been phished or an API key has been leaked.
Hardened SSO. Flag or block unusual login activity. A compromised staff or administrator account can be catastrophic when an LMS or login portal provides immediate access to dozens or hundreds of connected applications.
For years, Edlink has done the hard infrastructure work behind edtech: helping companies connect to schools, move data, support implementation, and build products people can rely on.
The ecosystem is now asking for the next layer of that infrastructure: more visibility, more safety, more operational trust, and more clarity.
This page follows the revised mission published in Revising Our Mission For a New World.