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Hey all! Delurk and hopefully a contribution as well. sink and I have been working on a startup called Knollop for the past couple months. Knollop is a portal for online education and its goal is to organize and personalize online learning materials in a meaningful way, whether it be MOOCs, OCWs, educational podcasts, independent modules, looseleaf tutorials, or really effin informative scalaz blogposts. Its current incarnation provides three verticals of functionality: keyword education search, reviews and ratings of learning materials, and education profile management. Ultimately, we are going to create knowledge dependency graphs by using automated introspection of course materials to reverse engineer very granular concepts (do you *really* need diffeq to understand the predator prey model? ). These smart topic hierarchies coupled with a very rich normalized course schema will hopefully allow us to create "learning pathways" for users based on learning preferences and prior knowledge. Info for the curious: We're in beta right now, steadily building up our database of providers and expanding our course schema, but the last 2 months have already been very eye-opening. Our stack is Django + Postgresql which is in the process of being migrated to Play (scala) + MongoDB. We've been doing a lot of experimental backend development for augmenting our scrapers with NLP capabilities and concept inference, the results of which will be exposed after the migration (and some clever UI design brainstorming). On the non-tech side of things, we've been learning a lot about user interaction, dynamics in the education industry, and trying to pick up business skills. Anyway, words words words. It'd be awesome if you could let us know what you think or if you have any questions  swyys fucked around with this message at 08:46 on Dec 17, 2012 |
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Dec 17, 2012 08:40
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Nybble posted:As someone who tried an education startup called Knackeo... Totally hearya... already registered 3 typo domains and trying to get my friends to stop spelling "knollup". Glad to hear about the Python interest-- the one that just ended at Coursera has been getting extremely interesting and glowing reviews  btw that's really cool-- what was your involvement in Knackeo? Any chance CourseHorse is/was your direct competitor?
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Dec 18, 2012 03:12
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unixbeard posted:swyys, I think you should provide the option to create an account for your site. Many people are stuck behind corporate firewalls that block things like facebook and g+. working on it as I, er, type! I think we're schedule to push it out tomorrow! I have to admit I've been pretty embarrassed that it wasn't implemented sooner  but seriously, thanks for dropping a note!
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Dec 18, 2012 09:38
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snagger posted:Sweet! Thanks for posting. No prob! Actually, now I have a question... we have teacher pages on the site. Are those something that you think your brother, as instructor, would like to have access to for editing? http://knollop.com/teachers/Dr.-Kris-Maloy/ snagger posted:Speaking of my brother's classes, can you guys critique our landing pages? Yup! There are several things: 1) Your introductory text is sorely lacking, both in your brother's description of the course and in his bio. Seeing as you're charging, you need to make it stand out from all the free content out there on the web (for example, we've seen plenty of free OCW material on the web). It's true that you'll learn these bits and pieces of theory, but *why* would the average person want to? Will they then be able to deconstruct their favorite music or find it easier to move onto playing a cover on some other instrument? Is this especially good supplementary material for string musicians? Given your lecture content, it seems like the course (I'm looking at the first one) will not cover more than what you'll get for free learning piano and guitar, as they always come with standard music theory, but not necessarily other instruments. Also, why is your brother the one people should be learning from... talk about his exact experience and anything applicable to working with beginners. In any case, just make sure to connect with users clicking through. 2) Price! You're on the high end of Udemy price points. Tons of people will drop $20 to take the most absurd classes (earthworm composting). I won't claim to be an expert on Udemy pricing, but I would research a little more thoroughly. I'm sure people would be several hundred to take a course, but right now it looks to me like the exchange is $300 to learn... intervals, and I'm not even sure what I would use them for. I could do that with some google. In any case, good luck! I studied music so always happy to see another musician succeed in a non-performance context. 
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Dec 20, 2012 15:38
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chupacabra-- I am very impressed by your search autosuggest! Anyway, it's really cool to see more sites try to integrate domain specific semantic/OG-type search. I gave it a whirl and it's pretty intuitive-- the search facet confirmation after you enter is really neat as well. Now I want to do the same thing for my site  I know you're just in beta and have limited listings, and are probably trying to conserve the cleanliness of the front page, but have you considered adding some listings and/or place/facet suggestions below the fold? I had some problems figuring out exactly how to search without receiving empty results.
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Feb 14, 2013 20:51
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bee-- how are you different from Skillshare and Udemy?
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Aug 23, 2013 17:13
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quote:
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Jun 16, 2014 21:34
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