Meet the new Lore. (Photo: Screencap)

The latest from edtech startup Lore: Today the company debuts a rebuilt platform, designed to function more like a social network and less like those dreadful discussion forums you might remember from your educational days.

The rebrand fits with the vision CEO Joe Cohen was excitedly evangelizing when last we spoke. Back in April, the company shucked its original name (Coursekit) and christened itself Lore, a move meant to provide the team with more wiggle room. “Our vision is to be a platform for learning in whatever form,” he told Betabeat, but refused to divulge any details on what that might mean, product-wise.

In a phone conversation yesterday explaining the changes to Betabeat, Mr. Cohen was every bit as irrepressibly pie in the sky:

“Our ambitions are bigger than kits or courses,” he told us. “We want to be this underlying software platform for the whole of education.”

That's a big ambition, all right.

Lore's approach: social networking, but specifically for education. The revamp introduces profiles, so that rather than the platform privileging a particular class, students and instructors will be individual users who happen to be participating in a class. The company has also merged the newsfeed-style stream and the class calendar, as well as adding a library to serve as a repository for course content.

"If you think about companies like Yammer, LinkedIn, they've validated this idea that you don't just have Facebook. You have situation-oriented social networks. And we're trying to do that for education," Mr. Cohen told Betabeat.

He described the results as analogous to LinkedIn: “We think we’ve got the largest connected community of instructors and students ever put together so far,” he said (even as he confessed there’s no real data to support that feeling), and the revamp is "the next step in making that fabric stronger but also more pervasive,” he added.

After a semester up and running at 600 schools across the country, Mr. Cohen confessed that he just “didn’t see the platform scaling” into the future to meet that broader goal. Hence the redesigned user interface.

Besides the more social changes, Instructors landing on the homepage are now prompted with the question “What do you teach?” They can choose from one of twelve areas where the platform has worked best, ranging from social studies to engineering. Once they select an area, they’ll get an explanation of how Lore works best for that particular discipline.

To date, Lore has raised $6 million in venture funding, including support from the king of higher-ed skeptics, Peter Thiel.

A sample question

This semester, Coursekit, an academic social network of sorts that gives teachers and students a way to communicate outside of class, tried a little experiment from the Peter Thiel school of thought.

Coursekit founder Joseph Cohen, a Wharton drop-out and TechStars New York alum, was already familiar with the work of Aswath Damodaran, a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business with a big academic following. So last year, he cold-emailed Mr. Damodaran to encourage him to join Coursekit's pilot program. "I don't think he was looking [for a solution like] Coursekit," Mr. Cohen told Betabeat by Gchat. "But when he saw what it could do...he and I really hit it off."

This semester, Mr. Damodaran decided to take it one step further and offer both his Corporate Finance and Valuation classes to anyone around the world, for free*. Considering that an MBA from NYU-Stern costs $100,894 for residents (with a "recommended annual budget of $82,867), we'd say that's a pretty good deal. (*Beer pong networking sessions with the future 1 percent not included.)

The first lecture started Monday, said Mr. Cohen. Without any press, almost 1,800 students signed up from 40 countries, representing six continents. "I believe in a future where you don't need to go to school to get an 'education.' This is a taste of that," he added.

On his blog, Musings on Markets, Mr. Damodaran called it, "a small challenge to the 'university' business model." (The scare quotes are his). "For hundreds of years, we (as consumers) have had no choice. Universities have operated with little competition and substantial collusion," he writes.

"But I think that the game is changing, as technology increasingly undercuts the barriers to entry to this business. I am not just talking about online universities (which, for the most part, have gone for the low hanging fruit) or the experiments in online learning from MIT, Stanford and other universities. These are evolutionary changes that build on the university system and don't challenge it. I am talking about a whole group of young companies that have made their presence felt by offering new tools for delivering class content and learning. I am convinced that the education market is going to be upended in the next decade and that the new model is going to do to universities what Amazon has done to brick and mortar retailers."

Unlike Coursekit competitor/nemesis Blackboard, a clunky closed-off system Betabeat first used back in 2006 during our own stint at an NYU grad school, the lectures and content will stay up accessible to all on line.

In a message to students, Mr. Damodaran said, "I want to make this class the very best class you have ever had (not just online but ever)." But he did offer a conciliatory note to his NYU employers:

"Just to be clear, my first obligation is to the students in my MBA classes and I will not stint or compromise on that obligation, but I view delivering a great learning experience to those taking the class online as a close second. Note also that you will not get any credit from NYU for taking this class."

Sort of puts the question of whether you're getting an MBA for the knowledge or the connections in stark contrast, doesn't it?

Coursekit

All sorts of things! Like what? we asked.

"Higher education accounts for half a trillion of our GDP," he said gravely. "What we're saying is we want to compete for a slice of that and be the platform by which vendors get to students."

That means distributing electronic textbooks for McGraw-Hill, for example, he said. The company is starting with courses but plans to expand to serve as a platform for departments and groups within universities; for example, all NYU students will be part of an NYU Coursekit.

Blackboard dominates the market because universities are slow and bureaucratic, Mr. Cohen said. The school administrators—not the people who actually use the software—signed contracts for the software in the late 90s and as far as they know, Blackboard works. "If you look at the software that is used to support real world education, it's really lousy most of the time," he said. "It's called a 'learning management system.' The leading learning management system, the company with a monopoly on the learning management system, is Blackbaoard. It's meant to be used for things like grading, management style, keeping in touch with the class. We said okay, let's do those really, really well."

Coursekit is certainly simple, although the news feed-centric app has some teachers confused. Coursekit ran a pilot program with 30 professors, and had problems mostly with professors who had never used Facebook. The app has the ability to collect papers and store them online and lets students post questions and comments in a discussion that's less like the forum-y feature of Blackboard and more like the unstructured realms of Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

Coursekit's five employees are holed up in a large loft in Tribeca with space for about 15 more, Mr. Cohen said, who he hopes to hire over the next 18 months. "It's fantastic, we're in Tribeca, but literally we're in this huge loft and we're in the corner," he said. The company is listing openings for a software engineer, front-end engineer, design director, product designer, and two interns.

Coursekit has already had a reality check after its public debut into the harsh world of Startupland: Business Insider broke the 3 p.m. embargo on the story at midnight.