

My first course: Online Popcorn.js based Django audio-course - fijter
http://django101.com/

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rwaldron
I'm one of the authors and maintainers of Popcorn.js and this is unbelievably
cool. I think you may be the first ever commercial product built with
Popcorn.js - so congrats on that and for making such a worthwile product.

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fijter
Great product Rick, loving it; saved me a lot of work, I'd love to donate once
I start making some money :)

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edkennedy
Inspiring! The way you used Popcorn.js is engaging, I could see myself using
this course. One thing I noticed in your sample chapter is that when I skipped
around to see a previous slide, the slides would not change relative to the
time. The slide always stays on the last one presented.

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fijter
Hey Ed, thanks for your feedback. I'm aware of this and I'm still looking for
a solution, let's hope Rick here can help me out ;)

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erikig
Very slick, I was hooked and watched the whole first chapter and I didn't
experience any issues to speak of.

As successful as the Django course might be (and it looks like it will be), I
think you should also consider working on an audio-course creation application
(in Django ;) and charge for that too so other people can create their own
courses similar to this one.

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fijter
Hey Erik, Thanks for the suggestion, I was thinking of this since I really
like the outcome myself. Might be one of my next projects ;)

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ohadpr
Looks great,

Can you share some background on how you decided to create this content, in
this specific method of presentation, how did you deicde on pricing, what are
your expectations, etc?

Thanks

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fijter
Hey Ohad,

I've already mailed you this, but for the others to read:

Some of the decisions are inspired by "The 4 hour workweek" book by Timothy
Ferriss; You could see this as one of my "muses" if you're familiar with it.
My price is based on the idea that it should be somewhere in between $50 and
$200, too cheap and it isn't worth the hassle, too expensive and people would
have to think a bit more about it or they expect extra support. I've checked
out other courses as well. Real life courses are a lot more expensive, online
courses are a on average a bit cheaper, but most of them are videocourses and
you don't have the option to ask questions or do the self tests.

My first try was a plain text course. After creating the second chapter for
50% I knew this wasn't the way to go. Way too much text to read, people could
buy a book and get the same.

Next try was a video-course, something like lynda.com is offering. It's nice,
but: most of the video is just static for minutes, you listen to teacher and
the only animation you will see is a powerpoint transition or someone typing
in some code. Video's consume a lot of bandwidth as well and what I really
missed was to option to click links or copy code snippets during a video-
course.

Next try was video with popcorn.js. This worked, but still had the same video
issues and I lacked the space on my screen to show the extra context.

My last try was the current one. It worked like I wanted it to work, but I
couldn't get the speech right myself, so I made a written script and had a
voice-over do it.

I've only created this first chapter to see if people are interested (another
useful advice from the book), If I get enough potential orders I'll finish it,
since it takes a huge chunk of my time to finish all 21 remaining chapters and
I need to pay the voice-over as well. I don't really have any expectations, if
it works out: great, if not: another nice experience, no big losses here.

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cowboyhero
Love the idea, but the demo is hanging on me. Looks like it's choking on
urls.api.twitter.com.

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fijter
Hmm, that isn't supposed to break... I'll fix that soon enough, must be the
tweet button there. Thanks for checking it out though!

