[unreal37]

So the number 1 complaint for this seems to be that most courses are abandoned mid-way through by the teacher for various reasons. If 80%+ of courses get only 2 lessons in before abandonment, this isn't going to really catch on as a learning medium.

The UReddit teachers are volunteers from the reddit community, not vetted in any way. You're going to get a wide-range of quality of instruction. Some people might not even know the topic they volunteer to teach, and plan to teach themselves as they teach others.

And it's a time-intense process creating interesting course content, and most people underestimate that up front. "Hey I'd love to teach a class on PHP" and then they realize it takes 20 hours a week to prepare each lesson... Uh oh.

[christensen_emc]

This goes the other way too. I signed up to teach a course and had close to 200 interested students. I was really excited, wrote up a syllabus and a couple small assignments (15 minutes tops) and created a wordpress blog for all my lessons. I put a fair amount of time in it and got a lot of great buzz, but that was all I got. 2 out of 200 people did the assignments and I only got a handful of hits on the wordpress blog. Noone commented on any of the discussions I put up. It was really disappointing and I ended up ending the course early.

That said, I love UReddit. Its a great idea. The reddit community is immense and there are a lot of opportunities for some really neat lessons that Coursera wouldn't necessarily offer.

[beshrkayali]

Which is why I think it would be a great idea to have a KickStarter-like system to fund these free courses. As much as someone wants to share their knowledge, it consumes a lot of time and effort. It would be nice if teachers got something in return, other than gratitude :)

A KickStarter-like system would also help in eliminating lurkers, and focus the efforts of both teachers and students on the actual course and assignments, and everyone would benefit if these courses are released for free after they're funded, but at least it guarantees an interested student base for the course to become a success.

[sliverstorm]

2 out of 200 people did the assignments

That lines right up with the 1% rule- only 1% of users are serious enough to be contributors, 99% are just lurkers.

Basically what I'm saying is, an initial interest of 10,000+ probably would have made for a more successful venture.

[christensen_emc]

oh absolutely, and thats why I think Reddit is ideal for this sort of thing. Its trivial to post something that tens of thousands of people will see.

[thejournalizer]

Unfortunately a lot of these points are correct. We set ureddit up as a self-service tool for the community. There is not a lot of incentive for teachers to continue on if their students don't show some sort of sign that they are still paying attention. If we had some sort of budget we would at least try to give them beer.

[QuantumGuy]

In that event there is always https://www.coursera.org/ or https://www.edx.org if the university of reddit doesn't pan out.

[xmmx]

Coursera is awesome. I'm 4 weeks into an introductory finance class and professor Kaul is doing such a good job of introducing concepts to us (I have no finance background).

[ekianjo]

I second that. I am following the same course and while I have some prior finance training this is nevertheless very useful to better understand some stuff I simply applied before. Great, great stuff.

[unreal37]

Yes the Finance class is going well for me too. I tried taking the SaaS class but I didn't like it.

The Finance professor is just right, I can watch the videos on 1.75x speed, and I'm finally getting the hang of the confusing, unintuitive and restrictive Coursera UI.

[dbh937]

and http://www.udacity.com/

[unreal37]

Udacity has some challenges as UReddit too. I took a "software testing" class recently, and you can tell the instructor ended the course earlier than planned.

A 6 week class was effectively only a 3-4 week class. The first two weeks had embedded quizzes, and homework. By the end, it was watch this short video and no homework.