Well, I guess the free LMS/social network Lore is going away soon!  I just got this email message the other day from the folks at Lore:



I had joined Lore back in the days when it was called CourseKit.  The product, and the company, was created by a bunch of undergraduate students who wanted their face to face professors to use technology in the classroom - at least that's what the lore is... (pun intended).

It was an interesting experiment but the product really stagnated.  It looked a lot like a Facebook and twitter clone for the classroom, but the non-social aspects of the platform (the "classroom management" aspects) were really clunky. In the following screenshot you can see what discussions looked like (sort of like a Facebook stream) - which is fine, but it could be hard to find past discussions in this format.


Other aspects that didn't work well and did not receive much development love were things like the syllabus which were really clunky (obviously these features were not programmed by someone who had taught).



It's too bad, really.  I think with a little polishing, and actual detail to development, this could have been an interesting product.

So...adieu Lore/CourseKit!  Happy to have known you!

Did you use Lore/CourseKit? What did you think?