Facebook education app gets funding

December 3, 2007 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

courses.jpgThe effort to make Facebook more useful for education has gotten a small boost. Inigral, a company behind a Facebook application called Courses, has raised slightly more than half a million in a round led by The Founders Fund, according to VentureWire.

Courses lets you find others in your college classes, then share notes with them, start a forum discussion, do a video chat and more. You can also keep track of assignments, upload your own notes and manage your course activities.

Facebook removed a feature earlier this year that let you list courses on your profile. The feature was useful to Facebook’s core college audience, but the company hoped that by removing it, third parties would be inspired to create better versions.

Many developers have tried, as you can see here, but few have gained any traction. Not that many people have added any of these applications, and once they add them, they hardly come back. The largest only has 3,284 daily active users.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Inigral was founded in August. It currently has 1,022 daily active users. In September, it smerged with MyCourseList, a rival course listing application.

It also plans to expand to other social networks, reports VentureWire.

Angel investors also participated in the round.

Justin Fishner-Wolfson, a Founders Fund associate, will join Inigral’s board. The Founders Fund founder Peter Thiel was also one of Facebook’s early investors.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Interesting! Its hard to see how you can make money though. It's nice to be able to reach out to a number of users. How that translates to $ is a different story. Its good to see interest from investors in this space.
  • Very tough space - been there, done that.

    Good luck to Inigral.
  • I'm part of a team that has been developing a Course Profiles Facebook app ( http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/010855.html ) for a particular institution - The Open University, the UK's distance education university.

    The avenue we're keen to explore is the extent to which 'public' social networks can be used to provide additional forms of support for our home study students, who are spread across the UK (and indeed, across the world).

    So as with the other apps, we support 'find a study buddy' functionality, 'friends on a course' and course comment walls.

    We're also offering support in the app for people taking OpenLearn open educational courses - http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn - so you can add an OpenLearn course unit to your profile if you want to. Again, the idea here is to help broker social networks amongst learners where physical colocation is all but ruled out, unlike the situation in trad universities where you sit in lectures with your peers.

    On the topic of daily activity, if a distance learner makes use of the app once a week, then we max out at 14% daily active....