Penn-founded Coursekit raises $5 million

Tom Paine


Coursekit, which was founded in 2010 by CEO Joseph Cohen and two others at Penn, just announced it has raised $5 million to continue the rollout of its "social learning management system". Investors in this round include Social+Capital (started by former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya), David Tisch, Joel Spolsky, IA Ventures, and several angel investors. Last year it had raised $1 million in seed funding led by IA Ventures and Founder Collective and moved to New York.

Coursekit joins several other new players in the LMS market, including other venture-backed startups, large education market player Pearson PLC, and open source tools such as Moodle and Sakai. They are taking on entrenched market leader Blackboard (recently acquired by Providence Equity Partners) among others. Coursekit's emphasis is on social collaboration among class participants, and for now seeks course by course adoption rather than institution-wide deployment.

I wrote about Coursekit last month. It started at Penn as a small project to replace paper-based course syllabai.



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Notes on upcoming Philly Tech Events: Occupy Novotorium , NJ Drupal Camp, Redsnake Philly & more

Novotorium, the newly opened business accelerator in Langhorne, will be holding an open house it is calling "Occupy Novotorium" at its facilities during the week of January 16 to 20. It will hold events each day and startups will be able to work from there on days for which they register. Its free, but space is limited and you must register in advance.

Due to office schedule conflicts at Zivtech, Drupaldelphia's monthy meetups will be moving from the first Thursday
of the month to the third Tuesday, beginning this month. January's meeting will be held on January 17 at Zivtech.

Speaking of Drupal, the first New Jersey Drupal Camp will be held on February 4 in Princeton.

Space at the Redsnake Philly event in February will be limited to 120 people, and the tickets are being split 50/50
between PhillyPUG and Philly.rb. PhillyPUG's allotment will distributed in-person to those who attend its January meeting on January 10.Priority will go to those who have been more regular attendees, says PhillyPUG Organizer Tom Panzarella in an email.


January's Philly Tech Meetup Founders Happy Hour will be held at Venturef0rth, a new incubator/shared workspace on North 8th Street in Philadelphia, on January 11. Its founders are Jesse Kramer, Elliot Menschik and Jay Shah.

This month's Philly Amazon Web Services (AWS). meeting on January 12 will feature a presentation by Monetate's Hunter Blanks on using Elastic MapReduce, spot instances, and Hive. It will be held at Vox Medica offices in the Curtis Building.

And a happy hour introducing Bob Moul as President of Philly Startup Leaders will be held on January 17 at Ladder 15.

You can follow all the major upcoming tech events on the Philly Tech Events Calendar .



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