Grockit, a startup that applies social learning to online test preparation, has raised $20 million in new funding. The investment is part of a partnership with Discovery Communucations, which led the round, and the two companies will work together to promote Grockit’s new product, Learnist.

Learnist launched to the public in May and expanded Grockit’s domain beyond standardized testing. The site looks a lot like Pinterest for online learning. Users can view lessons in a user-friendly board format as well as build their own and share. The platform supports over 30 types of embeddable media.

There is content on a wide range of topics, spanning art and design, business, education, food, music, politics, science, sports, technology, and travel. The selection is curated and comes mostly from a “small army” of teachers who know how to present information in a meaningful manner.

“Learnist lets users curate content online in a way that is sequenced, so it functions similar to a lesson plan,” said CEO Roy Gilbert in an email Q&A. “Unlike other online boards, Learnist allows users to upload a wide variety of media, including full Wikipedia pages, Google Maps, photos, and images, to name a few. The core differentiator for all Grockit products is that they include social, gaming, and mobile components to help students learn from and teach each other wherever, whenever.”

Before joining Grockit in 2010, Gilbert served as an officer in the US Navy and spent seven years working at Google, where he led Global User Operations, led Google’s operations in India, and launched the business operations for Gmail.

The company was first founded in 2006 by Farbood Nivi. Nivi migrated to the US from Iran as a child and has spent most of his career in education. He worked for the Princeton Review and Kaplan, where he witnessed first hand the power of social earning. Nivi founded Grockit, and then Learnist, with the goal of making education as engaging to today’s students as possible.

Learnist has grown to hundreds of thousands of users, largely driven by the introduction of the iPhone and iPad apps at the end of August.

Through this partnership, Discovery will create a dedicated channel for its content on the Learnist web, iPhone, and iPad platforms. Students will be able to learn from this material, while Discovery will benefit from seeing how people interact with its content.

This marks the fifth round of institutional funding for Grockit and is by far the largest. Over the course of six years, Grockit has raised a total of $24.7 million. This $20 million almost doubles that amount. Summit Group also participated in this round, along with previous investors Atlas Venture, Benchmark Capital, Integral Capital Partners, and GSV Capital Corp.

Grockit is based in San Francisco.

The days of chalkboards and workbooks may soon be a relic of times past. Teachers these days can supplement their curricula with interactive software and proctor tests without making hundreds of paper copies.

While new technology may enhance the learning process for students, it can be challenging for instructors to implement, which is why education startup Clever has raised $3 million to make this process easier.

Clever’s technology integrates data held in Student Information Systems (SIS) into educational software. If students use the internet to complete assignments or execute projects, teachers need this online activity to connect with overall tracking of their performance. This can be time-consuming and confusing for educators not trained in IT, which is where Clever comes in.

Founder Dan Carroll experienced this frustration first hand while working as the director of technology for a school district. He saw that educational software made things more complicated for teachers and set out with his two former Harvard classmates Tyler Bosmeny and Rafael Garcia to address this.

“One of the biggest changes in education is blended learning,” said Bosmeny. “There is so much innovation happening in software helping kids learn and boosting test scores, but when software isn’t integrated, data becomes siloed and out of date. We realized there was a data problem to helping schools fully use this software, and by making it faster and easier, we are transforming education.”

Clever works with developers of online learning applications so by the time the software arrives in schools, “it just works.” The information coming from these programs automatically updates student data, so teachers don’t have to. Since founding Clever in April and participated in the Y Combinator accelerator program, Clever has established partnerships with 40 ed tech companies, including DreamBox, Scientific Learning and MasteryConnect. Through these deals, the benefit of this technology reaches 2,000 schools and 650,000 students.

Bosmeny said that going through Y Combinator encouraged the team to iterate their product quickly and often, and to not only attract the attention of top tier investors, but also of influencers in the online learning space. A number of Y Combinator partners personally invested in this $3 million round, as well as SV Angel, Mike Maples, Jeff Clavier, Google Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Mitch Kapor, and Ashton Kutcher. From the education world, John Katzman of the Princeton Review and 2tor, founder of Chegg Aayush Phumbhra, and Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis also provided support.

The funding will go towards growing the scale of the company and the number of partnerships so that one day, Bosmeny said, all education software will plug into Clever.

Udemy is an online learning platform that offers videos and live lectures from hundreds of expert instructors. It includes courses in technology and business, with headings like “Ruby on Rails for Beginners” and “An Entrepreneur’s Checklist”, as well as more traditional subjects like “Ancient Greek Religion” and “Psychology 101″. In addition to academic subject matter, the site includes lifestyle, arts, sports, and music classes.

Udemy enables anyone to enroll in or build a class, intending to “disrupt and democratize the world of education”. Instructors can use video, PDFs, PowerPoint, audio, zip files, and any other relevant materials to share their expertise with the world.

“Students and instructors come to Udemy to make moves, and every iteration of our product aims to help them make those moves more powerful and more efficient,” said Eren Bali, CEO and co-founder Udemy. “We’re constantly hearing from users who got promoted or changed careers after completing one of our courses — that’s why we’re so invested in creating a learning environment that helps them realize their goals.”

The new features include a responsive full screen user interface, a Quora-style question and answer facility, a progress meter, time stamped notes, and a personalized course discovery engine that recommends classes based on each student’s interests. There are both free and paid courses and teachers can actually earn money. Last year the top 10 instructors garnered $1.65 million in combined sales.

Udemy launched in 2010 and received $3 million in a first funding round last year led by Groupon investors Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, with support from 500 Startups and MHS Capital. While many online learning platforms exist, such as Khan Academy, 2tor, Udacity, Pathright, and TED Ed, Udemy is one of the few platforms where the teachers (and thus the company) generate income, by taking a cut off all the paid courses. Lynda.com has a similar revenue model and brought in $70 million last year. Finally, teaching has become lucrative. Now if only the same were true of studying.