Edtech Listed is pleased to announce the honorees for the 2026 Edtech Listed Awards, presented in two categories: Excellence in Innovation and Excellence in Client Satisfaction.
Excellence in Innovation
This category honors Edtech products and solutions that push boundaries with leading-edge features, novel integrations like AI-assisted tools or research-based designs. Innovators have clear differentiation from competitors, enabling new ways to teach, learn or manage educational processes.
Alongside, by TimelyCare
Innovation
Alongside is a clinician-designed AI wellbeing coach that meets students in the everyday moments that rarely reach a counselor: school stress, friend conflict, big emotions, and executive function challenges. Support is available around the clock, and severe issues are screened and flagged so that human intervention is applied when it matters most.
The platform is purpose-built for schools rather than adapted from a general-purpose chatbot. Safety alerts, FERPA and COPPA aligned safeguards, and the published S.U.R.E. Framework for Youth AI Safety set clear boundaries for how AI should interact with young people. An ESSA Level II study links use of Alongside to attendance gains of up to 20 percent, putting measured outcomes behind the design. Over 200 schools nationwide now use the platform to reach students earlier, and in greater numbers, than staffing alone allows.
BrighterBalance
Innovation
Classroom behavior data has long depended on what a teacher can reconstruct at the end of a long day. BrighterBalance captures observations as they happen through a voice memo, a photo of a handwritten note, an email, or a single tap, each logged in about five seconds. AI classifies the student, behavior, and context, then produces Direct Behavior Ratings, ABC summaries, trend lines, and BIP goal tracking without re-entry or manual graph building.
For districts, the result is timestamped and structured documentation that stands behind MTSS and IEP decisions and Child Find compliance. The platform is BCBA validated and FERPA and COPPA compliant, and student data is never used to train AI models. It feeds MTSS platforms including Branching Minds, Panorama, and eduCLIMBER rather than replacing them. Early users describe it as easy to use and a clear improvement over previous methods of data collection.
Pathify
Innovation
A student resolving a registration hold, clearing a payment, or finding a club meeting typically moves through several systems with separate logins and different experiences on web and mobile. Pathify replaces that with a single personalized hub where the items needing attention surface first. The platform spans the full lifecycle, from prospective students through alumni, and extends to staff and delegates, so an institution maintains one interface rather than a collection of disconnected ones.
Pathify is vendor agnostic, with more than 130 standard integrations across SIS, LMS, calendars, student ID, and group systems, so institutions select their own technology instead of committing to a proprietary ecosystem. Consolidation then shows up in budgets: Alabama A&M University folded its legacy mobile app, student portal, employee intranet, and campus chatbot into one Pathify-powered platform and now saves $25,000 a year. University of the Pacific cut registration holds by 85 percent using targeted tasks and announcements, and had narrowed to five systems three years after the switch.
ATI Engage Series, an Ascend Learning brand
Innovation
The ATI Engage Series brings adaptive, mastery-based progression to nursing education. Claire AI draws on the content a student is studying to tailor practice, feedback, and remediation to individual performance, so learners strengthen clinical judgment before advancing. Case studies, videos, and podcasts connect coursework to real patient care.
Programs report substantial gains. At Iowa Valley Community College District, ADN NCLEX pass rates rose by more than 18 points to nearly 98 percent following adoption, with PN rates reaching 100 percent, and Mount Carmel College of Nursing recorded Content Mastery Series improvements across multiple degree programs. Faculty gain real-time analytics showing where students are studying and where intervention is warranted, along with ready-to-use teaching materials that save preparation time.
Element451
Innovation
Element451 is an AI agent platform built specifically for higher education. Its agents work continuously alongside admissions, marketing, and student success teams, answering student questions, delivering personalized outreach across channels, and handling routine work such as scheduling and application follow-ups.
Because engagement tools, agents, and predictive insight sit in a single platform, institutions avoid assembling capabilities from separate systems and can launch campaigns quickly. Agents analyze student data as it arrives and surface the trends and alerts that inform enrollment and retention decisions. Staff time returns to the relationship work that shapes a student’s experience, while the platform carries the repetitive volume.
CampusESP
Innovation
Parents are among the strongest influences on a student’s enrollment decision, and CampusESP gives institutions a direct way to engage them. Families receive personalized content through a portal, email, and text, with outreach tailored to funnel stage, FAFSA completion, and other attributes. Admission dashboards give families insight into student checklists, helping them keep their students on track.
The Parent Promoter Score identifies which families are most interested in an institution and helps enrollment teams forecast who is likely to enroll. Students with a parent in the top quartile of engagement are three times more likely to enroll, and students with a participating parent show yield rates roughly 7 percent higher on average. A content network supplies more than 90 percent of communications, launch takes about three weeks, and most colleges manage the platform in under an hour per week. More than 450 colleges and universities now reach some seven million parents each year.
CustomViewbook
Innovation
CustomViewbook turns the traditional viewbook into an experience prospective students build for themselves. Instead of a fixed PDF, the platform adapts in real time, surfacing the programs, stories, and next steps that match what each student says matters most.
Admissions teams gain first-party interest data from the first interaction, which flows into the CRM and shapes relevant follow-up at scale. Recruiters can also generate personalized viewbooks in bulk for leads already in their system, and events deliver instant value to attendees. Users point to its dual benefit: a better experience for students and a clearer picture for institutions of what those students actually care about.
EduSourced
Innovation
EduSourced supports capstone, practicum, senior design, and other externally sponsored project programs in a single platform where students, faculty, and outside stakeholders collaborate securely. Faculty gain workflow tools for running programs and overseeing many student teams at once, and privacy controls ensure schools retain full ownership of their project sponsor relationships.
The platform continues to expand what experiential learning offices can do, including automated capstone project monetization and project donations, both new to the category. Universities describe it as a substantial change in how their experiential learning programs operate, with several partnerships now running well beyond their first decade.
Wola Study
Innovation
Most study tools ask students to grind through the same flashcard-and-quiz format regardless of what actually keeps them engaged. Wola’s bet is that variety itself is the innovation: the same set of terms can become a flashcard deck, a slot-machine matcher, a randomized wheel, a memory game, or a printable bingo card, all generated from one underlying content set in minutes. Most competitors in the flashcard-and-quiz space pick one mechanic and stick to it, while Wola treats the format of practice as something worth innovating on, not just the content.
Excellence in Client Satisfaction
This category recognizes Edtech products and services that deliver exceptional user experience, time savings, cost reductions or improved outcomes. Pioneers and Honorees in this category demonstrate high levels of real-world impact and user validation from customer endorsements.
Outschool
Excellence in Client Satisfaction
Outschool offers more than 100,000 live online classes to over one million learners aged 3 to 18, taught by vetted independent educators across academics, creative subjects, and social and life skills. Small group formats, flexible scheduling, and simple enrollment let families shape learning around a child’s interests, pace, and needs.
Outschool has a vocally supportive userbase, as can be viewed on their Edtech Listed profile’s many reviews. Families point to that adaptability as the reason they stay. One parent described an eighth grader using Outschool for a full core and enrichment curriculum, moving at an accelerated pace while going deeper into literature and the arts, and a neurodivergent fourth grader regaining confidence through personalized courses chosen around her own interests.
Connected Core, by Collegis Education
Excellence in Client Satisfaction
Connected Core unifies CRM, SIS, LMS, and other institutional systems into a single cloud-based source of truth built on Google Cloud, with institutions retaining full ownership of their data rather than depending on a proprietary system. Around the platform sits a team of engineers, analysts, data scientists, and architects who operate as an extension of institutional staff. Partners tend to describe that combination, rather than the technology alone, as what they are buying.
Dr. Glena Temple, president of Dominican University in Illinois, credits Collegis with making data the university already held accessible and actionable, and describes the partnership as moving the institution years ahead of where it would otherwise be. Cristina Raecke of Augusta University Online points to specialist talent available at the right moment without exceeding budget, given how difficult assembling a comparable internal data team would be. At Rochester Institute of Technology, Shelly Yehl says the resulting insights supported a successful case for a significant marketing budget increase. Predictive analytics for at-risk students, marketing attribution, and enrollment forecasting are among the applications partners run on it.
Feedback Loop
Excellence in Client Satisfaction
Feedback Loop brings 360-degree peer feedback and team formation to teamwork-based courses, working fully within the learning management system so faculty and students stay in the tools they already use. Anonymity controls make constructive critique workable in practice, and setup stays light even for complex assignments.
Faculty describe the difference in practical terms. One instructor introduced 360-degree professional skills feedback into a course run as a simulated professional experience, called the rollout flawless, and noted that time once spent managing the process went instead to talking with students about their feedback.
That experience is reflected in how institutions and faculty choose the product. Babson College moved to Feedback Loop from a competing tool, and faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln sought it out independently while another license was already in place. Case studies at Georgia Tech, the Carson College of Business at Washington State University, and the University of Notre Dame College of Engineering document its use across engineering and business programs.
Skyward
Excellence in Client Satisfaction
Skyward provides student information, finance, and human resources systems to more than 2,700 K-12 districts worldwide and serves over 7.8 million students. Founded in central Wisconsin in 1980, the company develops and supports both product lines in-house.
Support is the strength Skyward names first. A dedicated response team, an active help center, live chat, and a range of training options are treated as baseline expectations rather than add-ons, backed by 17 specialized departments and more than 700 programmers, trainers, support specialists, project managers, and consultants. The standard the company holds itself to is whether districts are getting full value from their systems, which leaves schools spending less time on tasks and more time with students.
Preply
Excellence in Client Satisfaction
Much of language learning has responded to AI by automating instruction. Preply built its technology around the tutor instead. Matching begins with what a learner is working toward, whether that is an interview, an exam, confidence at work, or a conversation with family, and factors in schedule, budget, and preferred learning style to pair them with one of more than 100,000 tutors across over 90 languages. Tutors receive that context before the first lesson, so instruction is shaped to the goal from the start rather than converging on it over several sessions.
AI-powered tools then carry the work between lessons, helping learners stay focused, reflect on what was covered, and turn tutor feedback into measurable progress. What the combination produces is personalization at a scale one-on-one instruction has not previously reached: learners in 180 countries, millions of lessons a year, each built around a specific outcome rather than a fixed syllabus. Note: Preply is a double honoree in both the Innovation and Client Satisfaction categories.
Ziplines Education
Excellence in Client Satisfaction
Ziplines Education partners with over 30 public and regional universities to design and run short-format, workforce-aligned certificate programs. Courses are practitioner-led and cohort-based, structured around applied projects, and built to be completed alongside full-time work. Ziplines handles program design, marketing, enrollment, and learner support, allowing institutions to add employer-aligned offerings in fields like business analytics, project management, digital marketing, and applied AI without burdening faculty capacity.
Zipline’s partners are complimentary of the company’s responsiveness. Kristy Anthony, director of professional development at LSU Online and Continuing Education, calls the collaboration productive, credits the account team with strengthening program delivery, and notes that the certificates both expanded the portfolio and met learner needs. Learners finish with a university certificate and, where applicable, industry credentials from Salesforce, HubSpot, and Tableau, with coaching and instructor support throughout the cohort. Oregon, UT Austin, Florida International University, the University of Arkansas, and the University of Denver are among the institutions running programs on the model.
Alongside, by TimelyCare
Excellence in Client Satisfaction
Counseling teams cannot personally reach every student who is struggling, and many students never reach a counselor at all. Alongside gives schools a layer of support that covers those students: confidential coaching available around the clock in more than 36 languages, spanning over 50 common challenges from friend conflict and test anxiety to loneliness and self-esteem, with severe issues screened and routed to staff. One principal describes it as a counselor in a student’s pocket, available to everyone rather than only those who make an appointment. A district administrator notes that students who face barriers to seeing a counselor now have coping skills and tools of their own.
Districts see the effect in metrics they already track. An internal study with a school partner found a 70 percent drop in disciplinary referrals among students with two or more interactions a year, and one principal reported an 80 percent decrease at his school. Administrators also point to the dashboards, which show what students across a school are struggling with in near real time without adding to staff workload. More than 200 schools nationwide use Alongside.
Note: Alongside, by TimelyCare is a double honoree in both the Innovation and Client Satisfaction categories.
EnrollWise
Excellence in Client Satisfaction
EnrollWise is built for the complexity of public school district enrollment. The platform is configurable to local policies, priorities, and placement rules, so districts can adapt as those evolve without commissioning custom development, and it unifies applications, lotteries, seat management, reporting, and SIS integration in one secure system.
Families receive multilingual, guided application tools that make the process clearer and build trust. Administrators gain centralized control, real-time visibility, and precise placement tools that support equity goals and seat utilization. Robin Cecere of the Connecticut State Department of Education describes the resulting application and placement system as “user-friendly, informed, and efficient.” Experience gained with some of the largest districts in the country informs the feature set.
Preply
Excellence in Client Satisfaction
Preply connects learners in 180 countries with more than 100,000 tutors across over 90 languages. Matching starts with how someone prefers to learn and what they are working toward, whether that is an interview, an exam, confidence at work, or conversation with family, and tutors receive the context to build a plan around that goal.
Preply lessons can be booked early, late, weekly, or daily, helping learners stay consistent. AI-powered tools carry the work between sessions, helping learners stay focused, reflect on each lesson, and turn tutor feedback into progress. Human instruction stays at the center of the experience, with technology extending a tutor’s reach rather than standing in for it.
Note: Preply is a double honoree in both the Innovation and Client Satisfaction categories.
