Edmodo was an

educational technology Educational technology (commonly abbreviated as edutech, or edtech) is the combined use of computer hardware, software, and educational theory and practice to facilitate learning and teaching. When referred to with its abbreviation, "EdTech" ...

platform for

K–12 K–12, from kindergarten to 12th grade, is an English language expression that indicates the range of years of publicly supported primary and secondary education found in the United States and Canada, which is similar to publicly supported sch ...

schools and teachers. Launched in 2008, it enabled teachers to share content, distribute quizzes and assignments, and manage communication with students, colleagues, and parents. The service was shut down on September 22, 2022.

History

Edmodo.id was found by Nic Borg, Ed O'Neil, Jeff O'Hara, and Crystal Hutter in 2008. It was backed by

Index Ventures Index Ventures is a European venture capital firm with headquarters in both San Francisco and London. It invests primarily in tech companies. History Index Ventures has its origins in a Switzerland, Swiss bond (finance), bond-trading firm cal ...

, Benchmark,

Greylock Partners Greylock Partners is one of the oldest venture capital firms, founded in 1965, with committed capital of over $3.5 billion under management. The firm focuses on early-stage companies in consumer and enterprise software. History Greylock wa ...

New Enterprise Associates New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With over $25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of t ...

Union Square Ventures Union Square Ventures (USV) is an American venture capital firm based in New York City. The firm has backed more than 130 startups, including Twitter, Etsy, Stripe, Coinbase, Zynga, Tumblr, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Kickstarter, MongoDB, ...

Tenaya Capital Tenaya Capital is a venture capital firm with offices in Portola Valley, California, and Wellesley, Massachusetts. Founded in 1995 as Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Tenaya spun out to become an independent firm in 2009 following Lehman's ban ...

SingTel Singapore Telecommunications Limited, trading as Singtel, is a Singaporean telecommunications conglomerate, the country's principal fixed-line operator and one of the four major mobile network operators operating in the country. Overview T ...

, and

KDDI () is a Japanese telecommunications operator. It was established in 2000 through the merger of , , and . In 2001, it merged with a subsidiary named Au, which was formed through the merger of seven automotive and mobile phone companies from t ...

. In 2013, Edmodo.id was included in the list of "The Top Apps for teachers" by ''

PC Magazine ''PC Magazine'' (shortened as ''PCMag'') is an American computer magazine published by Ziff Davis. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009. Publication of online editions started in late 1994 and continues . Overview ''PC Mag ...

''. The same year, Edmodo acquired a startup, Root-1, in an effort to establish itself as the app store for education. Vibhu Mittal, co-founder and

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

of Root-1, became the CEO of Edmodo the following year. In 2014, Edmodo launched Snapshot – a suite of assessment tools to measure student progress on educational standards. The company also partnered with

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books ...

and

Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press was the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted a letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it was the oldest university press in the world. Cambridge University Press merged with Cambridge Assessme ...

to provide access to educational content on the Edmodo Platform and bring Edmodo Snapshot to the UK. In January 2017, Edmodo launched professional development courses for teachers in the state of New York in conjunction with NYPTI. These included both a synchronous video classroom component as well as an asynchronous, text based discussion component. On May 17, 2017, Edmodo sent an email informing users that it was the victim of a major hack of user information. Some 77 million users' data were breached: this included the username, hashed password and email address (in a subset of the cases, since not all users need an email address to register). Since passwords were both hashed and salted (encrypted) using the

bcrypt bcrypt is a password-hashing function designed by Niels Provos and David Mazières. It is based on the Blowfish (cipher), Blowfish cipher and presented at USENIX in 1999. Besides incorporating a salt (cryptography), salt to protect against rain ...

algorithm, the effort to decrypt all the passwords would have been very large. There were no reports of any school data being affected, nor any identities compromised, according to an external audit commissioned by the company. In June 2017, Edmodo announced Ask Mo, an educational video search engine. Ask Mo's search algorithm is based on videos that had been shared by teachers in the context of educational discussions and can be filtered by subject and grade level. On April 8, 2018, Edmodo announced that it was being acquired by NetDragon for $137.5 million in cash and stock. In July 2019, Edmodo claimed to have over 100 million users worldwide. On August 15, 2022, Edmodo announced that the platform would be closed on September 22, 2022.

Criticisms

The

Federal Trade Commission The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an independent agency of the United States government whose principal mission is the enforcement of civil (non-criminal) United States antitrust law, antitrust law and the promotion of consumer protection. It ...

on May 22, 2023 sued Edmodo, LLC for violation of the

Children's Online Privacy Protection Act The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) is a United States federal law The law of the United States comprises many levels of Codification (law), codified and uncodified forms of law, of which the supreme law is ...

by collecting data on children without parental consent and "for unlawfully outsourcing its COPPA compliance responsibilities to schools." A penalty fine of $6 million USD was imposed, but would only have to be paid if Edmodo continued business in the United States. On June 28, 2023, in conjunction with the United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California, the FTC laid a

permanent injunction An injunction is an equitable remedy in the form of a special court order compelling a party to do or refrain from doing certain acts. It was developed by the English courts of equity but its origins go back to Roman law and the equitable remed ...

on Edmodo, LLC. to not violate COPPA rulings, prevent the collection of any more data than was necessary, and to delete all data collected from students under 13 years of age.

References

{{Classroom management software American educational websites Classroom management software Internet properties established in 2008 Privately held companies based in California Android (operating system) software Companies based in San Mateo, California 2008 establishments in California Educational technology companies of the United States IOS software Internet properties disestablished in 2022 Products and services discontinued in 2022