- All of those system of records are adding exactly those capabilities and bundling them at no extra cost. How do you plan on overcoming that?
We should talk. I used to work with universities.
- The key issue for the sector is the tens of legacy systems that don't integrate with each other, often with manual spreadsheet processes that could be easily automated. Yet the big players like Oracle sell a generic CRM experience that doesn't fit well with higher education.
Are you hiring? I have 8 years of university SIS implementation & migration experience and 2 years of Edtech AI engineering experience and this is the exact problem space I want to work in.
- How's it like working with schools/universities as a startup? I've always heard edtech can be a slow, bureaucratic sales cycle (and maybe not a high willingness to pay?).
I know a few different companies who ultimately moved out of the education market completely or just try to leverage their education traction as a beachhead to other markets. It sounds like you're focused on the education market - what's your take?
- Impressive and a good mission startup!
How did you get workday, peoplesoft etc. to give the data to you? I assume all these companies do not like to share data, since as someone else also pointed out that each of these system of records are adding AI capabilities and bundling them.
- The recommendations don't look very insightful, and seem like a rephrasing/summary of the alert above it. For example the first student who has account holds, bad grades, etc. the recommendation is just to schedule a meeting. I don't think the LLM will be able to provide super insightful recommendations. Even in the improvement plan generated by the agent, the steps seemed pretty generic(as expected from LLMs).
I do think you have value in pulling in the disparate data sources and using LLMs to present the data in a clean way to the advisor/user.
by frsandstone
1 subcomments
- Very cool work. I particularly like your focus on student outcomes and building a curriculum that extends beyond the classroom to extracurriculars. I hope you succeeed.
by noFkingIdea42
0 subcomment
- Sounds like a massive band aid. What do you do when that band aid is no longer maintained properly? You wouldn't be able to rebuild the systems underneath because the staff are now reliant on interfacing with the band aid.
Wouldn't it have been a better long term fix to replace the antiquated systems?
- We should chat. We rapidly capture the existing operating models in universities for analysis and optimization of administrative workflows.
- I'm 10+ years into IT in higher ed. I'm intrigued by the ideas here. Do you envision Risely being entirely a reporting system that runs _against_ existing systems and data, or do you envision Risely being another source of truth where some data lives? Because if it's the latter, I'm feeling big xkcd.com/927 feelings.
We're a small non-profit liberal arts school, and we already have 70+ integrations feeding to and from the various sources of truth and systems of record. It's a mess.
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