Dropping out of university to launch a start-up is old hat. The twist with J

游客2024-04-25  5

问题     Dropping out of university to launch a start-up is old hat. The twist with Joseph Cohen, Dan Getelman and Jim Grandpre is that their start-up aims to improve how universities work. In May 2011 the three founders quit the University of Pennsylvania to launch Coursekit, soon renamed as Lore, which has already raised $6m to develop what Mr. Cohen, its 21-year-old chief executive, describes as a "social-learning network for the classroom".
    Lore is part of a trend that builds on the familiarity with social networking that has come with the success of Facebook. It customizes the rules of a network to meet the specific needs of students. Anyone teaching a class would reasonably worry that students using Facebook were gossiping rather than learning useful information from their network of friends. Lore allows teachers to control exactly who is in the network by issuing a class-membership code and to see how they are using it. They can also distribute course materials, contact students, manage tests and grades, and decide what to make public and what to keep private. Students can also interact with each other.
    In the academic year after launching its first version last November, Lore was used in at least one class in 600 universities and colleges. Its goal for its second year, about to begin, is to spread rapidly within those 600 institutions, not least to see what the effects of scale are from having lots of classes signed up within the same institution.
    The firm has a fast-growing army of fans in the faculty common room. Lore, says Edward Boches, who uses it for his advertising classes at Boston University, makes teaching " more interactive, extends it beyond the classroom and stimulates students to learn from each other rather than just the professor. "
    Among other challenges for the company, there remains the small matter of figuring out a business model. For the moment it has none. Mr. Cohen hopes that eventually Lore could become the primary marketplace for everything from courses to textbooks, but so far the service is free and carries no advertising. Blackboard, the industry incumbent(占有者), charges users for its course-management software. It remains to be seen how it will respond to the upstart(新贵).
    The lack of a plan does not appear to bother Lore’s founders or investors, who seem content to learn a lesson from another university drop-out, Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook: achieve critical mass in your network and the profits will follow. And after that perhaps they can expect an honorary degree from the alma mater(母校). [br] For its second-year goal, Lore is to______.

选项 A、increase fans in the faculty common room
B、launch its second version in 600 universities
C、make more classes from 600 institutions signed up
D、spread its influence within the same institution

答案 C

解析 推理判断题。本题考查“学问”的第二年计划。定位句指出,即将开始实行的第二年计划是在600所机构里扩大影响范围,不仅仅是看到同机构里很多班级报名的规模效应,故答案为C)。A)“增加教员休息室的粉丝”文中没提及,只说了已经拥有越来越多的教师粉丝,故排除;B)“在600所大学中发起第二个版本”,该段开头指出使用的是第一个版本,未提及第二个版本,故排除;D)“扩大它在同一所机构中的影响”,文中的not least to see已经表明它们不满足于这个目标,故排除。
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