Comments on Founders no 4
From blogs.ubc.ca/etec522Sept2013
Week 4: Entrepreneurial Bootcamp
sarahrowe 1:14 am on September 27, 2013
Joseph Cohen – Founder and CEO at Lore
Lore (formerly CourseKit)
Lore is a class-focused platform for academic groups. It works off a Facebook-style concept (social networking), but tailors the platform to provide students and instructors with academic support modules available on typical CMSs, such as calendars, discussion boards, file sharing, and libraries (groups of reference materials). In true collaborative spirit, anyone can create or edit a group, not just professors. The concept is mainly directed at large and small college groups (ranging from study groups to tutorials or lectures) but could also be used at the secondary school level.
Founder Joseph Cohen studied at Wharton and the University of Pennsylvania. Although background information on Cohen is limited in the online world, I’ll choose to use the team profile on lore.com as a basis for analysis. The team of Lore has a series of core values, which support disruptive change (Break Rules), the value of self-exploration (Be an Artist, Learn, Own), and the entrepreneurial spirit (Invent, Think Big, Push). No doubt that Cohen had a hand in driving the development of these values and clearly indicates an entrepreneur with the dynamic personality and great ideas needed for a successful venture. Other team members include Dan Getelman, co-founder and CTO for Lore. With his education also from UPenn, it seems that Cohen and Getelman met and developed their idea for Lore at university. No wonder the company says that “learning is about people”.
**********
Comment by Janette
jiorns 2:13 pm on October 3, 2013
Sarah, thanks for sharing about Lore (Coursekit) and its founder.
The use of Facebook for learning is attractive to many instructors, because it engages students. It’s easy to understand how the Professors at University of Pennsylania had the motivation to create their own social learning platform given their institution prohibited social media for learning. Joseph had the entrepreneurship (as well as intrapreneurship) to develop and market the platform for use outside the university, thus creating a new educational technology.
Lore provides a virtual platform to other educational institutions or instructors seeking social media options, or even a basic LMS. But there is no new pedagogy behind what it offers.
The benefit is the free use of the Lore platform to post course content, hold discussions, post assignments, etc.
The negative is the risk of loss of privacy and IP. The T&C on lore.com state that there is no guarantee that only those students an instructor invites to a course will access it. Setting up a private cohort does not mean the users and course content (IP) always stay private.
Lore seems to be operating as a social enterprise as I don’t see any obvious business model by which it generates income.
