Dive Brief:
- EdCast has raised $6 million in venture funding from Menlo Ventures, Novel TMT Ventures, Mitch Kapor, Cervin Ventures, Aarin Capital, NewSchools Venture Fund and the Stanford StartX Fund in a round led by Softbank Capital.
- The funding will help EdCast further its concept of "multiversities" that exist beyond single institutions via the cloud using its Knowledge Cloud platform to facilitate inter-university collaboration.
- The company's 39 university partners currently using Knowledge Cloud, which was build using OpenEdX, can use the platform to create their own MOOCs, and EdCast envisions the educational collaboration expanding to include companies and governments alongside the schools.
Dive Insight:
Among the current university partners: Columbia University, Michigan State, Trinity College Dublin, and the University of Botswana. Speaking with VentureBeat, the company's founder and CEO, Karl Mehta, said that EdCast's model will let students mix and match what curriculum, teachers, and resources they want from several institutions. Are students ready for this cloud-based education buffet? Previous MOOC experiments by other companies have shown mixed results, but the number of EdCast partners is reportedly set to jump to 200. Perhaps the market and model will be ready this time.