Scaling Online Tutoring Across US School Districts with Pearl Education

As Pearl expanded its tutoring programmes across US K-12 school districts, it needed a virtual classroom that could scale with its growing client base. It needed a partner who could do this without compromising reliability or adding the overhead of building and maintaining a virtual classroom in-house. Lessonspace provided the technology behind Pearl’s Advanced Classroom, helping the company ramp up to over 3,900 monthly tutoring hours in under 120 days while maintaining 99.99% uptime.

Pearl Education provides a Student Support Platform that helps K–12 districts coordinate program delivery, connect implementation and outcome data, and understand what's working across student support programs. As Pearl’s work with K–12 school districts expanded, the company needed a purpose-built virtual classroom that could integrate seamlessly into its existing platform. 

Pearl’s goal was to give districts a seamless way to manage virtual tutoring alongside the operational visibility and implementation data available through the broader Student Support Platform. That required an online classroom that could support high volumes of tutoring hours while delivering a reliable, intuitive experience for students and tutors. Pearl integrated Lessonspace’s online classroom to create the "Pearl Advanced Classroom". 

The Challenge: Quick, Pain-Free Integration 

School district education teams demand reliability, detailed session visibility, and strict compliance, and the Pearl Advanced Classroom needed to handle thousands of concurrent students and tutors without missing a beat. Quality at scale was also important because dropped calls, latency issues, and clunky tools lead to frustrated tutors and damaged trust. 

Building and maintaining a custom, real-time virtual classroom in-house would require significant developer resources, ongoing maintenance, and constant infrastructure tuning. For Pearl, the challenge was finding a solution that could be integrated quickly, scale with its growing district client base, and meet the reliability and compliance expectations of US school districts. 

Therefore, Pearl chose to partner with Lessonspace. Rather than building from scratch, Lessonspace provided a faster, more efficient, carefully designed solution: a robust system that Pearl could integrate directly with their existing Student Support Platform.

The classroom needed to handle the peaks of the school year and meet the compliance requirements of the US districts. And as a trusted tech partner, Lessonspace needed to provide ongoing support to the Pearl team. 

Loved working with Matt and the team! They are great. The team is amazing, and the platform is easy to integrate with.

John Failla, Pearl CEO

The Solution: A Reliable Classroom Partner

Lessonspace provided the ready-to-go virtual classroom Pearl needed to complement its Student Support Platform without the overhead of developing and maintaining a classroom in-house. As pedagogical and technical experts, the Lessonspace team has spent years carefully designing and testing the tool for this exact use. A dedicated product team continually improves and adds to the classroom infrastructure, with a support team on standby to resolve any questions.

Pearl could plug Lessonspace straight into their platform and hit the ground running with tutoring sessions. It was easy to scale reliably as they expanded their US school district client base. 

A ready-to-go, white-labeled virtual classroom

It was important for Pearl to ensure a consistent online classroom experience across their clients, whether they were running a hundred tutoring sessions or a thousand. The Pearl Advanced Classroom, powered by Lessonspace, provided this consistency as Pearl scaled and gave a cohesive look and feel for users across multiple districts.

The classroom’s stability is backed by US servers delivering 99.99% uptime and a reliable user experience for both students and tutors. Additionally, Lessonspace meets US security requirements through its SOC 2 Security Compliance.

A specialized platform built for scale

When tutoring programs operate at scale, district leaders need visibility into what students are actually receiving. Pearl gives districts a connected view of program delivery and implementation data so leaders can monitor participation, understand what's happening across programs, and make more informed decisions. Lessonspace contributes important virtual-session data and classroom functionality through features including:

• Attendance and session tracking: Providing Pearl with the ability to automatically track student attendance and sessions.

• End-of-session alerts: Notifying tutors when a session is ending, allowing them to extend if needed and keep control over the session.

• Cobrowser tool: Enabling collaborative, interactive web browsing during live tutoring sessions to improve tutor usability.

• Session recordings: Integrated directly into Pearl’s platform for quality control and session review.

• Collaborative whiteboard tools: Improving the interactive learning experience for students and tutors.

• Dedicated support: Providing tech assistance and guidance, regular check-ins, and open communication for the Pearl team. 

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The Results: District Expansion with Enterprise Reliability

Pearl could scale its tutoring operations quickly while relying on Lessonspace for the underlying virtual classroom infrastructure. Instead of spending months or even years building custom software in-house, Pearl integrated quickly and easily with Lessonspace’s white-labeled solution and ramped up to over 3,900 monthly tutoring hours in under 120 days.

This meant Pearl could support growing tutoring programmes across school districts without taking on the ongoing development and maintenance required to run its own virtual classroom, allowing its team to focus on the broader Student Support Platform and the needs of the districts it serves.

This growth is backed by:

• A user experience that remains the same for each tutor and each student, no matter how many sessions, tutors, or schools.

• Session data integrated into Pearl to give district leaders a clearer view of tutoring implementation.

• An enterprise-grade system that is reliable, secure, and compliant.

Lessonspace has been a great partner as we've scaled. Their classroom is reliable, easy to integrate, and gives us the flexibility to deliver a seamless tutoring experience while our team stays focused on the broader needs of the districts we serve.

— John Failla, CEO, Pearl Education

For Pearl, the partnership meant having a proven, compliant, enterprise-ready virtual classroom that could scale with its district expansion, without the overhead of building and maintaining the technology in-house. With Lessonspace handling the classroom infrastructure, Pearl could keep its resources focused on the broader Student Support Platform districts rely on to manage and understand program delivery.