Houghton Mifflin Unveils Developer Portal, APIs and Codefest Challenge

LET THE API DO THE TALKING: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's edtech shop, HMH Labs, is rolling out APIs for developers to build tools that can be accessible to HMH's community of over 50 million educators, students and parents. "We see HMH being an interoperable champion for our community," Brook Colangelo, Chief Technology Officer at HMH, tells EdSurge. "This gives us an opportunity to connect with edtech startups, with APIs being the velcro that allows people to connect with our company and customers."

The HMH Developer Portal currently has three APIs available, starting with Identity, the "core foundation to the ecosystem" that allows developers to know who the users are, says Colangelo. There's also Assignment, which allows developers to interact with scores and results, and Document, whicah can be used to store and share content between third-party tools and HMH users' accounts.

In the press release, HMH Labs Vice President, Claudia Reuter, cited tools that "help teachers track attendance or a tool to help teachers and families communicate more easily" as examples of what can be built with the APIs.

So far Colangelo estimates that 100 people have signed up to use the APIs. That number is sure to increase during the Curious Codefest, a hackathon that the publisher is hosting on June 27-28 to encourage more developers to build edtech tools using its APIs. The first- and second-place winners will get $4,000 and $2,000, respectively, in cash.