Post-acquisition ActiveGrade team of three stays intact, takes on new roles

Less than five months after its acquisition, Iowa City-based startup ActiveGrade is releasing its first new features under the Haiku Learning Systems platform. Originally designed as an electronic platform to help educators track student development, ActiveGrade merged with the cloud-based platform in February, significantly expanding its market and the features available …


ActiveGrade now allows educators to track and record students’ progress based on classroom goals.

Less than five months after its acquisition, Iowa City-based startup ActiveGrade is releasing its first new features under the Haiku Learning Systems platform.

Originally designed as an electronic platform to help educators track student development, ActiveGrade merged with the cloud-based platform in February, significantly expanding its market and the features available to its users.

The three-person ActiveGrade team has remained in its Iowa office and continues to work virtually with members of the company across the country.

“ActiveGrade by itself is still there chugging along, but we’re not actively working on it anymore,” said the startup’s co-founder, Michal Eynon-Lynch, now a product manager at Haiku.

Instead, the team members and co-founders of ActiveGrade have adopted new roles in the company, with Riley Eynon-Lynch working as a senior software engineer and Dan Sweeney as a senior designer.

Michal (right) said the merger was largely about giving Haiku the ability to become a standards-based learning management system. While the old ActiveGrade product functioned largely as an electronic gradebook, new features will allow Haiku users to track students’ progress in relation to classroom goals and concepts through online projects. 

“Now when you create a new assignment that students can view or turn in online, you can instantly map it to the particular concepts, learning goals or standards in your class,” Michal said. “So the students can see an activity is assessing them on these skills and so now the teacher can leave separate scores for each of these standards.”

Two-thirds of the original ActiveGrade team will head to San Antonio June 23 to 26 to demonstrate the platform’s new standards-based alignment at the International Society for Technology in Education‘s annual conference. 

 

Credits: Product photos courtesy of Michal Eynon-Lynch. Eynon-Lynch head shot from ActiveGrade.com.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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