In January, Coda Story’s Africa Jackson wrote about the student performance monitoring app ClassDojo and concerns of racial inequity in the classroom.

The coronavirus pandemic and the closure of schools across the world has created a boom in education tech software. According to Crunchbase, a site that tracks startup industry trends, five times as many families joined ClassDojo in the last week of March than in any week in the company’s history. 

School closures in the U.S. have affected at least 55.1 million students in 124,000 public and private institutions. Now that most schools have moved to remote learning or a hybrid model of in-person classes and online education for the fall, concerns about discrimination and privacy have resurfaced as parents and teachers become more reliant on ClassDojo and similar platforms.

Investment in education tech has soared in the past two years, hitting a record $18.66 billion in 2019, and is predicted to accelerate in the wake of Covid-19. In addition to ClassDojo, Google Classroom, K12 and Powerschool are some of the players set to benefit from the move to online learning.