LumenLearning founders Kim Thanos and David Wiley.
Lumen Learning founders Kim Thanos and David Wiley.

Lumen Learning, a Portland-based startup that offers college students access to open courseware, today announced that it raised a $2.5 million seed round. The investment was led by Oregon Angel Fund, with participation from Portland Seed Fund, Alliance of Angels, and other individual investors.

Founded in 2012 by Kim Thanos and David Wiley, Lumen Learning helps students at more than 60 institutions save 90 percent on textbook costs by offering open education resources (OER) for popular college courses. OER are available under public domain or have been released under a copyright license and include full courses, course materials, videos, tests, and more.

lumen learning“Colleges and universities are eager to address college affordability and access problems with the types of high quality open educational resources we provide,” Thanos said in a statement. “This funding allows us to scale our North American operations more rapidly to meet the robust demand we’re experiencing.”

Lumen Learning takes advantage of the millions of dollars that government, foundations, and other educational organizations have invested in OER and designs its own low-cost learning materials. To develop the company’s course catalog, Lumen Learning looks at the 75 highest enrollment courses on U.S. college campuses.

Individual students and professors can use the OER on Lumen Learning’s site for free. As EdSurge notes, schools that want to integrate the course material into their learning management systems or need support for faculty can pay a fee based on enrollment numbers. Students and teachers are also able to improve existing OER content, and then share their revised work with others.

Lumen Learning was previously a grantee in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Next Generation Learning Challenge and Next Generation Courseware Challenge programs.

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