Last summer, we told you about the launch of Noodle Education, a startup co-founded and led by John Katzman, perhaps better known as a co-founder of The Princeton Review and 2U (formerly 2tor). The startup is on a mission to bring a Netflix-style recommendation engine to the fragmented and noisy world of education. Not unlike Google, Noodle Education wants to organize the world’s learning platforms and aggregate the huge amount of educational info out their on the Web into a learning-centric, personalized search and recommendation engine.
The startup has been quiet since, but today we’ve learned that the company has made its first acquisition, scooping up Founders Fund-backed learning management startup, Lore. Formerly known as CourseKit, Lore has been developing a new take on the familiar “course management system” with a gradebook, calendar and document uploader for class assignments, while providing students with “a social network-style newsfeed for classroom conversations,” as we wrote at the time.
Initially focused on building forums around courses with tools designed specifically for teachers, last fall, Lore launched its student-facing platform to let students create academic profiles, follow classmates and professiors and join study groups, clubs, and so on. The network had its first semester live last spring, and since then has signed up more than 600 schools and added thousands of courses across a range of disciplines.
While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, we do know that that this is primarily a technology acquisition. Katzman tells us that Noodle Education will be acquiring the platform and all of Lore’s assets, but that the startup’s seven employees are each evaluating whether or not to join Noodle on an individual basis.
Lore founder Joseph Cohen, who developed CourseKit (which later became Lore) with Dan Getelman, and Jim Grandpre while undergraduates at The University of Pennsylvania, will not be joining Noodle. That’s not to say he’s not happy about his startup’s exit — which he and his two co-founders left school to pursue full-time — in fact, he tells us that he couldn’t “imagine a better home for Lore,” and that the company shares “shares [Lore's] ambition to build a better future for education … what’s more, John Katzman is one of the best, most experienced education entrepreneurs that I know, so I’m excited to see how he grows the platform and help him do it where I can.”
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via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/6sAn5fyfffA/
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