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People paid us $10,000 last week to learn how to program. Lessons learned...
- Ryanmf 15y agoFwiw: I hadn't heard of you until I saw this post. I took a look at the website, and having seen that and read the article decided to sign up. I was immediately prompted to sign in with Facebook, and I closed the tab.
- choxi 15y agoYep, there's a few people who have requested non-Facebook login. We're working on it :) If you'd like you can upvote that feature request here: http://niroka.uservoice.com/forums/136707-general http://niroka.uservoice.com/forums/136707-general
- ryanhuff 15y agoDon't take this the wrong way, but can you explain the thinking on requiring a Facebook login?
- untog 15y agoI don't want to speak for them, but usually you use a Facebook login to save time. It isn't just a case of making a signup form, you've got confirmation e-mails, forgotten password functionality, secure password storage, etc. etc. None of it is insurmountable of course, but using Facebook saves a ton of time and lets you plug into a load of social features at the same time. Yes, some people will reject it but they're a small proportion of the average userbase. A site aimed a HN readers may have a somewhat different proportion, of course.
- choxi 15y agoyep, you got it. that pretty much sums up why. although, at least with Rails, there's so many authentication gems that it's comparable to implement Facebook login versus email/password login.
- ryanhuff 15y agoThanks for the feedback. I am debating this very issue now for an iphone app, and the time savings of not having to build a registration system for v1 is very appealing.
- meric 15y agoYou use Facebook login to save your users' time (they don't have to sign up again), gives you access to your users' photos (those that click a like button), that you can display publicly to your other users. Making a signup form, setting up confirmation emails, forgotten password, secure password storage, takes only a good plugin and half a day, but it still wouldn't give you the social features facebook provide. Think not of the costs you will incur (they are likely to be small anyway, relatively speaking), but the benefits you can provide to your users.
- asiekierka 15y agoNot everyone has a Facebook account.
- Robin_Message 15y agoAnd Siri doesn't work with Scottish accents — what's your point? (Mine is that most people do have a Facebook account, or can get one, and you have to have a cutoff on customers' demands somewhere. For example, it probably doesn't make business sense to support non-Facebook users before translating the whole thing into Chinese, Hindi and Russian, at least.)
- tjoff 15y agoAm I the only one that thinks it's sad that the opinion above seems to be widely accepted? People just don't have any respect for integrity anymore and they don't even realize that they don't care about it either. And who gives a sh*t about the non-typical user? Adapt to the typical user and just crap on everyone else. It's all about fast gains and nothing about quality. No one seems to have realized that you can have long-term gains by building decent software. Also, getting Scottish accents to work in Siri is probably a hassle (where you barely can do it without an accent). Implementing your own registration system is not. You have no excuse for relying on facebook only for logins and I loathe you for it. I might be a minority not worth taking into account but I have a hard time believing you value your users so little that you don't fix your own registration (relying on facebook says something about you and fortunately this is still considered something negative (even though most would use it anyway). Example: spotify).
- choxi 15y agoSure, we just wanted users to have a more social experience with our site. With Facebook login, you can show profile pictures and names, and eventually make it easier for friends to take classes together.
- Domenic_S 15y ago> we just wanted users to have a more social experience with our site. This strikes me as bologna, because right now it's meaningless (see: "eventually" make it easier...). IMO it's perfectly reasonable to say that you didn't want to roll your own registration system.
- choxi 15y agoSure, I agree that's a valid reason. It wasn't our reason though, I've worked with Devise on Rails projects many times so implementing that would have been just as easy as implementing Facebook Connect. Honest. I like meric's response as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3179759 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3179759
- uxp 15y agoIf you've already got all the functionality for Facebook Connect, it doesn't take a whole lot more to add in Google and/or Twitter Oauth. Giving your potential users a number of options is always a good thing.
- tjoff 15y agoIMO it's not reasonable at all. It might be boring but it doesn't take much time at all and forcing your users to login with facebook is just lazy and irresponsible. A social experience might be nice but make sure it's optional, having only facebook as a means to login makes you look fraudulent.
- scott_s 15y agoSuggestion: if the instructor can also bring in another knowledgeable person, they can receive real-time email/chat questions, and try to answer them, or aggregate them in a meaningful way so that the instructor can address them. I don't know how well this suggestion will work in the general case because it requires two people who are capable of teaching the course, but it may help. Particularly if the person fielding real-time questions starts seeing trends. Also, if you can't do that, maybe you could set up chats with 6 (or so) students each, who could try to answer each other's questions.
- schmittz 15y agoThat's an interesting concept. It would be helpful to see that other people are having the same issues in a given class. I wonder how successful an automated system would be based on key words. Something like a twitter stream for a live feed, but more concentrated to focus on recurring questions.
- petercooper 15y agoIn theory, you could do it with one, if you were prepared to make a leap in the delivery. Breaking up a 200 person class into 20 person groups would entail repeating the same material 20 times. Instead, it could be done live once, then replayed to those groups. The tutor could then devote all of the text chat time to Q&A on each live session.
- scott_s 15y agoI meant have ad-hoc chat sessions among subsets of the class, to simulate students whispering questions to each other in a classroom lecture. I think that what you suggested would eventually become 20 different lectures - and if you only have 20 people, why not just do a group call?
- rokhayakebe 15y agoI have a feeling one of these sites (Niroka, Skillshare, Codecademy etc...) will be a billion dollar revenue school. Edit: I have a former colleague who started his own SEO shop a while back. After getting tired of competing on price, he switched his business model. He now goes to small companies and charges a minimum of $1000/day to train employees on SEO (I have no evidence, but I believe him). I can only imagine how much money the above companies will make if they were selling course to businesses.
- hugh3 15y agoI have a feeling one of these sites (Niroka, Skillshare, Codecademy etc...) will be a billion dollar revenue school A billion dollars a year? How are they going to manage that? How many people out there want to learn to program computers, and how much are they willing to pay for it? One million customers per year at a thousand dollars a pop? One hundred thousand customers a year at ten thousand dollars a pop? Ten million customers a year at a hundred bucks a pop?
- schmittz 15y agoYou're assuming the end game is programming.
- hugh3 15y agoYou're right, I am. Comments like yours are a little annoying because you're telling me off for making assumptions without providing alternatives to those assumptions. What else would the end game be? Then we can have a discussion about whether that's reasonable, and whether you can get there from here.
- schmittz 15y agoYes, I apologize. I wasn't telling you off, I wanted to succinctly point out that there's more to the idea. To address your semi-rhetorical question, this model is easily adaptable to anything that you want to casually learn (excluding what I'll call "traditional education spheres"). That is to say, right now it's incredibly difficult both to offer to teach a cooking class in your community and to find a cooking class to take. Thinking about Niroka as a way to connect people with skills willing to teach to people interested in learning new hobbies is better than thinking about it as a place to go to learn (blank). If they grow and expand in this way, Niroka would become the starting point if you're interested in learning a new skill that can't easily be absorbed through what's currently available on YouTube or printed on the web (this also presents people who do offer some of these services that way an easy way to monetize). In a similar vein, it can also be easily adapted to handle scheduling for small businesses dedicated to teaching schools (in exchange for a cut, they maintain the schedule of classes and provide a large potential audience for say, a local pottery place or yarn store, etc.) The harder market to tackle would be traditional education where topics can require highly specialized knowledge and fall prey to bad teachers.
- anjc 15y agoCan somebody please clarify the article for me, they were trying to teach people, non-programmers, Objective C in a week? I can't imagine teaching non-programmers 'hello world' to a well understood but basic degree (syntax etc) in a week, let alone in Objective C, let alone in iOS.
- jeffreymcmanus 15y agoIt's a very aggressive schedule, and live video (I would argue) doesn't help -- it simply puts pressure on students to focus nonstop, which is very challenging. The CodeLesson iOS course takes four weeks, and it's all time-shifted, so students can take in the material on a schedule that makes sense to them and ask the instructor questions any time while the course is in session.
- anjc 15y agoThanks. That sounds like it would be extremely challenging for non-programmers, if that's who it's targeted at.
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- pixcavator 15y agoI find this kind of reports very encouraging. I think the future of education is professors becoming free agents in a free market. Really, why can a lawyer set up his own firm or a doctor start his own practice and deal with life and death situations but a professor can’t just teach a few calculus courses without being affiliated with a university?
- morsch 15y agoWell, for one thing, because we as a society may decide we don't want professors or students limiting their field of studies solely motivated by its ROI.
- pixcavator 15y agoBut it's OK for doctors, lawyers and their clients to do that?
- morsch 15y agoI guess there's room for both in all three professions you mention.
- michael_dorfman 15y agobut a professor can’t just teach a few calculus courses without being affiliated with a university? There's nothing stopping a professor from doing just that; there's no legal requirement that all calculus courses be affiliated with a university. However, there seem to be some very good reasons (some market-based, in fact) why this is not the business model most professors choose.
- pixcavator 15y agoThey can't give course credit or award degrees. There was a relevant quote posted recently by "tokenadult": “the diligence of public teachers is more or less corrupted by the circumstances which render them more or less independent of their success and reputation in their particular professions.. . . . The privileges of graduation, besides, are in many countries . . . obtained only by attending the lectures of the public teachers. . . . The endowment of schools and colleges have, in this manner, not only corrupted the diligence of public teachers, but have rendered it almost impossible to have any good private ones." -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Part 3, Article II (1776)
- sireat 15y agoHmm, I guess I was the only one who got a Pop-up asking for e-mail with no obvious close button. This was on regular Firefox with a few plugins.