Learning Management Buyout: East Lansing's CourseWeaver Acquires EduCog

EAST LANSING (WWJ) -- The East Lansing education management provider CourseWeaver Inc. says it has completed the acquisition of the assets of Haslett-based EduCog LLC.

EduCog, founded in 2004, provides universities and K-12 schools with hosting, migration, support services, textbook content conversion, and training for the global LON-CAPA (Learning Online Network with Computer Assisted Personalized Approach) learning management system.

LON CAPA is a networked, highly customizable teaching, learning and assessment environment developed by a partnership of educators to meet the needs of teachers and students -- in use internationally, with hundreds of partner institutions.

CourseWeaver had its origins in the mid-1990s, when MSU developed an assessment, testing and homework engine for physics and mathematics classes. In 2000 MSU got a National Science Foundation grant of more than $4 million to develop it into a complete learning management system.

Today, CourseWeaver builds itself as a learning content marketplace, and it's currently in use by a couple of hundred educational institutions and more than 200,000 students.

CourseWeaver allows independents, authors, and professors to publish and sell granular educational content alongside commercial publishers and free, open-source materials, within a new integrated global marketplace – empowering instructors to share, sell and use the best resources available globally.

And besides creating a democratic market for course content (called "learning objects") from individuals and publishers, it also provides realtime dashboard analytics to monitor whether or not students are mastering the material in near-real time.

"We look forward to welcoming and continuing to support existing LON-CAPA customers, said Robert Fulk, CEO and co-founder of CourseWeaver. "Their experience and ideas, together with our educator-industry coalition, help drive the continued development of the next generation CourseWeaver learning platform: by educators for educators,"

More at www.courseweaver.com.