Fighting to fix online education's engagement problem, NovoEd books $2M

What’s the greatest shortcoming of online education today? It’s boring. Really boring.

That’s the problem NovoEd raised $2 million to solve.

NovoEd, the fourth massive open online course (MOOC) platform to launch out of Stanford — following edX, Udacity, and Coursera — aims to make online education stickier. While most MOOC platforms attempt to recreate the lecture hall, NovoEd wants to facilitate collaborative, group-driven education for universities.

NovoEd’s goal, of course, is to reverse the huge dropout rate online courses often face.

Following a April 2013 debut, NovoEd claims it’s already “improving college graduation rates by tackling remedial math” and “increasing online course retention rates by more than 10x.” As we wrote last year, “the company started out as Venture Lab, a project run by a Stanford professor and a PhD student to make online learning more social, experiential, and interactive.”

The site has so far partnered with UC Berkley, Princeton, and numerous other educational organizations.

To date, NovoEd has raised over $2.04 million, according to a public SEC filing. The round first kicked off over two months ago and has yet to close.