#oneschool

OneSchool is pleased to announce the OneSchool API for educational data.  The OneSchool API will release, free of charge, data on courses, textbooks, school events, faculty directories, organizations, and bus transit information at hundreds of schools across the country. Over 20 startups and developers have committed to our API Private Beta.

Last week we met with Aneesh Chopra, the CTO of the United States, and discussed how the entire higher education community could benefit as more startups, enterprises, and non-profits gain access to university data and leverage this data in new and upcoming technologies for the greater public good.  

At the EDUCAUSE conference, we presented our Open Schools Initiative, which aims to create an unprecedented level of openness in higher education. If schools use a standard system to produce data such as course details, facility maps, faculty directories, grade distributions, campus events, student organizations, and real-time transit information, the schools, communities, and students would benefit in terms of cost, reliability, and accessibility. We believe in one school data format, one open standard, and one higher education community, united for a common cause.

Educational data is very difficult to get.  Right now, there are only two ways to get most of it.  One is to go through the tedious, expensive, and often unsuccessful public records/FOIA request process. The other, for those with the technical know-how, is to write complex programs to scrape data from college websites.  Because educational data is unavailable or not machine-readable, innovation in the education market by startups, nonprofits, and enterprises is stifled. We believe this situation is unacceptable.  We believe that a standard set of data should be easy to access at every school in the world. That's why OneSchool, as part of our OPEN initiative to liberate higher education data, is releasing the OneSchool API.  The API will be available at first in private beta to a select group of launch partners to test and improve the API before public release.  The API will be continually improved, as we add more schools, and provide increasingly comprehensive data.

Check out our API at http://oneschool.com/ourapi