A long, long time ago—about two years—students filled Facebook and found and “friended” others who were taking the same courses. They shared information and tips. Then in 2006 Facebook was opened up to nonstudents, and class interests got crowded out.

A new Facebook program aims to bring it back, allowing members to view their courses and chat with classmates and friends that have opted in to the program.

As colleges have worked over the years to solidify their Web 2.0 presence and reach out to students where they’re most likely to congregate online, there’s often a glaring omission from their overall Internet strategies: social networks.

That’s not so much an oversight as a hesitation, with many institutions still debating whether to adopt social networking capabilities of their own or grit their teeth and take the plunge into Facebook, with all the messiness and potential privacy concerns that would imply.

Back when Facebook was a social network only for college students, one of the most popular features was the ability to see not only who was in your class, but who else was taking the same courses as you.

Facebook did away with that feature as it broadened beyond the college market. But now another startup is looking to fill the void that Facebook left behind. It is called Inigral and it is backed by the Founders Fund, the same group of angel investors who first invested in Facebook (Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund is still on Facebook’s board).

A small start-up company called Inigral is trying to bring back some student-centric functionality to Facebook with one of the first enterprise applications for the social network.

The new application is called Schools and will allow students to view their courses via Facebook and communicate with classmates and friends that have opted in to the application.

Inigral, a company behind a Facebook application called Courses, has raised slightly more than half a million in a round led by The Founders Fund, according to VentureWire.

Courses lets you find others in your college classes, then share notes with them, start a forum discussion, do a video chat and more. You can also keep track of assignments, upload your own notes and manage your course activities.