Software Devs and Educational Tech Teams, listen up! (New Services Offerings for 2025)

How did we get here?

When we started up Yet Analytics, it was with a team that had woodshedded for years in the education space. Rose and Milt had worked together on instructional technologies at the Hopkins Media Lab; Margaret had come through Hopkins’ School of Education; Jason had worked on tech and IT at the university; and I had spent about a decade teaching high school, leading grad courses in education, and doing consulting and non-profit work in the space.

Eleven or so years later, the Yet team has a track record that you may not have expected given our origins. We’ve been deeply enmeshed in the development of open source semantic data technologies, global data standards, and projects that at times seem more like they represent the “plumbing” of IT and data infrastructure than they have anything specific to do with learning outcomes. I think it is safe to say that we don’t fit into the bucket of “edtech” companies.

And yet, I’d argue that every single thing we’ve done over the last decade has been about learning.

In focusing on xAPI data, we’ve spent countless hours exploring how best to describe the experience of learning in ways that are both human-relatable and machine-readable. In our work on learning data standards, we’ve focused on those areas — activity data, metadata, competencies, and records — that (if applied with care) can have a positive impact on a) understanding learning activity and b) using that understanding to improve learning outcomes.

The first real xAPI project the team worked on was a simple desktop flight simulator and an accompanying wearable app that would track (or attempt to track) changes in stress level during training flights. That was back in 2014.

Within a few months, we were providing the “data flow” pieces to a real-world project in the space of emergency medical training — where we got a first-hand look into the training experiences of EMTs and ambulance drivers, nurses and emergency room doctors, and the instructors and designers of the amazing and sophisticated training simulations that help produce the “choreography” of emergency medical care.

We’ve worked with a number of healthcare training professionals over the years — from folks working to improve the ability to measure outcomes at a nursing school to a team in the midst of the redesign of an LMS developed for medical education to a big health non-profit trying to integrate learning and business data.

It was in 2016 and 2017 that we began our work in the government sector. If you look at our company bibliography, your see a scarcity of publications in that time period. This is because we were heads down on software development — first in the early iterations of our Learning Record Store, then on ADL-sponsored work to develop xAPI analytics and to create a means of generating synthetic xAPI data.

The synthetic data story is kinda funny. It started out as a trio of friends sitting around a food court table — two lightly razzing the other about a sketch he’d made on the back of a napkin. In the hands of some remarkable engineers, that simple sketch turned into DATASIM — which since then has become the largest single producer of xAPI data in the world.

Most recently, DATASIM has been used to test data models describing the behaviors of instructors during pilot training.

You never know where things will lead.

For the last eight years or so, we’ve worked mostly in the government space. The reason being that in order to build and test the types of open source solutions that we want to build, we need to work on learning and training projects of the highest degree of complexity. This has included work integrating data systems with AI tutors, synthetic training environments, and enterprise-level competency frameworks. Throughout these projects, we were able to direct value and cost-saving back to the government while opening up the capabilities of our open source to the world.

As for the education space… well, though over the last decade we occasionally worked on projects in K12 and higher ed, the projects were few and far between. That’s about to change.

As we rounded out the year for 2024, one of the things that we started to realize was that we had amassed a great deal of knowledge about processes and best practices that would be relevant to all sorts of technical teams — whether software engineers working to instrument learning apps and games or tech teams in educational settings needing to update processes in order to keep up with the number of requests they were receiving.

And so, we spent time at the beginning of this year to take some of what we learned as advisors to technical learning projects in the gov space, in aviation training, and in healthcare training and use that information to inform the creation of new mentoring, advisory, and consulting services.

The Services

In addition to continuing to provide our ongoing support, maintenance, and upgrades to SQL LRS and the rest of our open source software portfolio for our clients and the broader community, we’re starting up a host of new services.

Software Advisory

For software developers at-large (especially those working on learning apps, next-gen LMSs, serious games, XR, and wearable training), we’re offering mentoring and advisory services to get you up to speed on learning data standards and to help you on data instrumentation projects. For example, if you are working on a Unity-based project, we can help you to expand and implement the capabilities of our xAPI Publisher for Unity — so that you can track and measure all kinds of learning activities that occur within mixed reality and VR environments.

We’re also offering team augmentation to software development teams — where engineers from our team join forces with engineers from your team — to take on larger and more complex projects such as relate to data architecture, integrations, xAPI Profile design, and data flow and filtering strategies based on the Total Learning Architecture.

Education Advisory

For software developers and technical teams at educational institutions — schools, districts, SOEs, and higher ed — we’re offering a dedicated track of mentoring and advisory services related to the unique challenges faced in the education space. This will include help on needs and gap analyses, help updating processes and technical documentation, and assistance in creating data, query, and reporting templates that can serve as powerful technical knowledge management tools.

We see the work that technical teams do in districts — from gathering data needed to submit grant proposals; to performing market research related to new software acquisitions; to collecting and processing data related to construction and other large capital projects; to ensuring the quality and safety of devices and IT provisions; to helping the CTO and other offices create data-driven reports to deliver to the Board — we see it all as part of the work of creating better learning outcomes. Through mentoring and advisory services, we want to help technical teams to succeed in their work so that teachers and students can succeed in theirs.

We’re also offering team augmentation for large projects such the implementation of Learning Engineering and advanced data instrumentation at the district or state level. Working together, on the same team, we can accomplish much.

Where are we going?

We’re thrilled by the uptake of SQL LRS and our other open source software, and we are looking forward to bringing you the next thing (we really can’t wait, it’s going to blow your mind).

We’re also really excited to focus this year on sharing our knowledge and experience both with developers of the next generation of learning software and with the tech teams at work everyday in schools. It is important to us to revisit our roots in the education space, and we hope to bring you great value over the course of the year.

Feel free to get in touch if you have questions or would like to schedule some time to chat.