14 ms·
Coursify: A Free Open-Source Online Course Platform
- allworknoplay 12y agoThanks for cloning my company's product, we're flattered. http://usefedora.com http://usefedora.com (We're the ones who power courses like http://bitfountain.io http://bitfountain.io)
- imaginenore 12y agoExcept yours isn't free. Your "free" tier costs $1 + 10% per transaction, which is ridiculously expensive. Even Paypal doesn't rip me off that bad.
- ankurfedora 12y agoSure, but even if you find our pricing completely outrageous, that doesn't make it OK right?
- conradwa 12y agoWe actually drop the transaction fee once you're actually making money. Check it out: usefedora.com/pricing. To your point, if there's a free tier with a transaction fee, doesn't that mean it's totally free to use? We handle all the hosting for you, so it's a little misleading to call this system free. With Fedora, we make money when you do - which is an amazing alignment of incentives if you ask me. This really helps people who are just starting out and want to use a robust product. Right now folks using Fedora teach near 400,000 students in any language you can imagine. Disclaimer, I Co-Founded Fedora and you have any questions, feel free to reach out conrad@usefedora.com.
- chrisrxth 12y agoSure there are differences. It's still a blatant clone. OP could have at least created his own UI.
- efuquen 12y agoFrom the person who "cloned" your product. > I looked at a few self-hosted Online Course platforms, but they all wanted a monthly fee + transaction fees, which I think is excessive.
- corobo 12y agoTo be fair if it comes to pinching things your name seems familiar. I'm guessing you went with usefedora.com as getfedora.com was taken? :)
- shahocean 12y agoCongrats on your launch! Just wondering, how did you come up with this pricing model? I think you need to change it because majority of the buyers can wait for 1 day than paying $400. OR am I missing something here?
- Felix21 12y agoI created that price plan because I want most people to avoid rushing me to install it for them. I'm very busy so the peace of mind that most people won't choose that plan is why it's so expensive. Thank you.
- NamPNQ 12y agoonly with video learning support?
- Felix21 12y agoNo, you can add text as well. In fact for now, video is an after thought.
- njaxe 12y agoIncredible work. You made something that someone would make by reading a bunch of rails beginner tutorials and you want to monetize your "work". I am sure that will be some people who will give you their hard earned cash, but when I see such mediocre approaches, I just want to scream. Moodle does what your open source creation does in much better ways. This project of yours should have been something to play around with to learn about rails, not a attempt to make money out of this.
- njloof 12y ago1. Isn't this that negativity we were trying to avoid? 2. Who's Moodle? Never heard of them. 3. Coursify is a more memorable name for the product than "Moodle", isn't it?
- jschulenklopper 12y agoRef. 2: Moodle [1] is a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalised learning environments. According to their own stats, it is installed on 50k sites, and hosts millions of courses (but many of those could be samples or now defunct). [1] https://moodle.org/ https://moodle.org/
- jschulenklopper 12y agoAnd ref. 3: indeed, "Coursify" seems to be a better name. But Moodle has a cool acronym: "modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment" :-)
- tomjen3 12y ago1) Its a new user, but it seems to be too perfect for a troll.
- adim86 12y agoI actually don't see the value in the comment you just made, besides making an Ad for moodle. This guy made an app, open sourced it and you pay him if you want him to install it for you. I do not see a problem here. This product is not geared towards programmers, it for people who do not have technical skills and if you have you can build your own or use his for free. I think your feedback is very unhelpful for someone that is trying to make money from their skills why not say something positive or encourage rather than call them a beginner and tell them to go hang out in their sandbox. Well he is on the front page of hacker news so clearly other people here see the value in what he is doing.
- sbose78 12y agoLooks great, could you have a list of features you offer? :)
- techplex 12y agoThe github link on the downloads page seems to be broken: https://github.com/felixog/coursify https://github.com/felixog/coursify
- Felix21 12y agoI launched at 8AM (without sleeping all night) and I forgot to make the Git-Repo public (oops). Its public now and the link now works thank you. BTW, the actual download link on my website takes you to Dropbox and that link works.
- phenomenon 12y agoReally neat! online courses are on the rise and having such a platform just makes it easy to start one. Just found a typo - "That means you'll get the best developers from all over the world, working hard to make Courify an excellent platform for you to sell your online course." I see "Courify".
- Felix21 12y agoI'll fix it now thanks. That's what happens when you launch at 8am without sleeping HAHA. Edit: Fixed
- Felix21 12y agoWOW! I made it to the front page. Okay so I posted it yesterday and went to bed. Thank you all for your support an feedback. When Udemy decided to start charging 50% of every sale, I needed another way to sell my Online Courses. I looked at a few self-hosted Online Course platforms, but they all wanted a monthly fee + transaction fees, which I think is excessive. So I started working on Coursify. With Coursify, you can download it, install it and use it without paying. If you don't know rails, you can pay me a one-time installation fee and you can use it forever without any more charges from us... I also released it under the MIT licence, so others can improve on it. Thank you.
- nsp 12y agoIs this your project as well? https://medium.com/@sergiojota/codeweekend-review-nigerian-scam-or-legit-mess-eb106c58069c https://medium.com/@sergiojota/codeweekend-review-nigerian-s...
- sergioschuler 12y agoI wrote the article on Medium. I was in contact with 2-3 ex-students of that course. None of them received refunds several months after my article (I imagine I received the refund because I started the "movement").
- Felix21 12y agoYeah 2 years ago. I decided to stop commenting on that but yeah that's just one side of that story
- UserRights 12y agoQuestion: from the video I get the impression that this platform can handle only ONE course, is this right? Still a very nice implementation, good interface work!
- Felix21 12y agoThanks for your feedback. Yes that's right. Is multi-tenancy something you'll like? If it is, I can start working on this next week.
- UserRights 12y agoOf course multitenancy [1] is a nice feature to have for every web based software, however I just wanted to clarify if it was possible to use your product if one has more than one course to offer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitenancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitenancy
- Felix21 12y agoIt's designed for just one course at the moment. I'll add support for more multiple courses later, but at the moment no, you can't sorry.
- fweespeech 12y agoI was excited until I realized the Courses weren't open source. Ah well. xD It looks nice for its purpose. Congrats on launching. :)
- Felix21 12y agoDo you mean the OneDayRails course?
- fweespeech 12y agoI meant I thought it was a project to encourage people to build & deploy open source courses on a platform. :)
- Felix21 12y agoOh that's a good idea. Seed planted
- wehadfun 12y agoAny plans to have a hosted version?
- ozkan 12y agoHmm.. seems like server is unable to response to overwhelming & sudden interest
- ankurfedora 12y agoFelix, I'm the founder of http://usefedora.com http://usefedora.com -- a product you are intimately familiar with. Love the effort and open source contribution -- but definitely put off by stealing our UI/UX almost verbatim (example site built with our tool: http://bitfountain.io/courses/iwatch-course http://bitfountain.io/courses/iwatch-course <-- the same people as your case study, your tool: http://www.onedayrails.com/ http://www.onedayrails.com/) While it is incredibly flattering for a small startup like ours to have an open-source derivative, stealing our interface and design patterns for a project that you charge hundreds of dollars in installation fees definitely leaves a bad taste. Do it right and we'd have probably helped you promote it. But this just doesn't seem cool.
- Felix21 12y agoHi Ankur, I very much didn't intend to offend you, copy you or cause you to be upset. That homepage design is based on what Udemy looked like before their update and that's why I felt okay to use it as a starting point. That said, I'll update the homepage for the course today with a new design as a gesture of good faith. I think the platform itself, not the homepage/sales page is what the people using coursify like. I suspect many of them won't even use that homepage. It's just a starting point. Again I'm trying to make friends not enemies. Hope I didn't offend you. Felix Happy Easter.
- ankurfedora 12y agoThank you, appreciate the response and the new design. Keep me updated with future developments (ankur@usefedora.com) and maybe we can work together in the future.
- Felix21 12y agoHopefully we can. I'll let you know when the new design is up. I've already coded most of it.
- chrisrxth 12y agoI second Ankur's thoughts here. We've put a lot of time and energy into making our user experience simple and beautiful and while we take it as a compliment that you liked it enough to use our design, we would appreciate it if you came up with your own original design as to differentiate from us. We're not just a random online education platform that popped up out of the blue - we're real people working very hard to build a quality product.
- matthias_ 12y ago.
- funkaster 12y agogreat job! it looks like a good replacement for people trying to juggle with the complexity of a software like moodle. I'm also interesting in knowing if it will support some type of assessment, because it looks like so far it's only a paywall for content. Do you have plans to add support for any type of assessment?
- Felix21 12y agoI'm already working on quizzes. I still need to refactor the current code base though so that feature is at least two weeks out. The multi course feature is already working as well and once I clean the code up, I'll update the code base on GitHub. Do you have any other type of assessment in mind?
- flashman 12y agoIs your target market individual education entrepreneurs and small teams, or do you have plans to offer this product to universities? The reason I'm asking is because many colleges would spend money on a lightweight course builder that hooked back into their existing learning management system, especially if it gives them flexibility to develop their own courseware, or hosts it for them.