Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by christensen_emc 5045 days ago
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.
2 comments
beshrkayali 5045 days ago
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.

link
sliverstorm 5045 days ago
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.

link
christensen_emc 5045 days ago
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.
link