

University of Reddit - abijlani
http://ureddit.com/

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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.

~~~
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.

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QuantumGuy
Anybody else keep getting 502 Bad Gateway errors or is it just me?

~~~
UnfalseDesign
Same here. I guess it couldn't handle the onslaught of HN.

UPDATE: It is working but it is sloooow. Getting hammered, I guess.

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ktsmith
It's also linked from the front page of Reddit via the official blog.

~~~
UnfalseDesign
Ouch. It never stood a chance. =)

~~~
thejournalizer
Nope. We knew this going into the day that the blog would kill us.

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christensen_emc
I wish this had a dedicated team of paid developers working on it. It could go
places I don't think Coursera would necessarily go.

Some things I'd like to see added:

\- some sort of improved notification system for announcing new lessons and
assigments and mass messaging your students. Perhaps something a little more
prominent than the current OrangeRed messages? Having a separate alert for new
lectures would be cool.

\- a well written guide and list of resources for lecturers. Step by step
directions on how to do stuff like set up a wordpress blog or a subreddit or
even a dropbox would probably be a good idea for non technical folks. The
existing "Help" link is broken, so I'm not quite sure what is offered.

\- The ability to embed pictures, diagrams, equations and charts into reddit
self posts would be cool. Markdown supports it but it doesn't seem like Reddit
does. Maybe raise the character limit so that an entire lesson could fit into
a self post on Reddit itself instead of forcing a lecturer to link to an
external blog? Some sort of collapse and expand system on top of Markdown
would be cool too!

I'd love to help with this.

~~~
thejournalizer
It's open source, so you are more than welcome to. If you want I can point you
to Anastas, the one and only developer we have.

~~~
christensen_emc
That would be cool. My email is in my profile. I'm sure I could help out in
some way.

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tikhonj
This sounds like a great idea.

The main complaint seems to be that courses get abandoned by the teachers.
Given that everyone is just doing this for fun, it's completely
understandable, but still an issue.

I wonder if this can be fixed by having more than one teacher to each course.
This would not only halve the work each instructor has to do but would also
provide additional motivation to stick to it. I know that I would be much more
likely to keep on teaching a course if I knew somebody else was also invested
in the projects--something like peer pressure, I guess.

Coincidentally, my CS department is doing this with real professors in some of
the real courses and it's going really well. Having multiple instructors
switch off and present topics in different ways is rather effective.

I certainly wouldn't mind teaching a course on something interesting that I
know (a very narrow field, admittedly), especially if I had somebody else to
teach with. Of course there are also questions about how much free time I will
have this year :P.

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rmason
It says in the footer that it is not affiliated at all with Reddit or Conde
Naste.

Do you think that the lawyers at Conde Naste might have a problem with it?

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skeletonjelly
The reddit admin team (edit: the reddit community manager) just posted a blog
about this today. I assume that means they have some kind of arrangement.

[http://blog.reddit.com/2012/08/university-of-reddit-
explore-...](http://blog.reddit.com/2012/08/university-of-reddit-explore-
any.html)

~~~
InformalRelief
He does not mention that topic at all in the blog post.

~~~
skeletonjelly
Right but this is coming from the horse's mouth here. Also Conde Nast no
longer owns reddit, rather their parent company does.

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engtech
Trend Microscan reports ureddit.com and it's favicon.ico as suspicious.

URL Blocked

The URL that you are attempting to access is a potential security risk. Trend
Micro OfficeScan has blocked this URL in keeping with network security policy.
URL: <http://ureddit.com/> Risk Level: Dangerous Details: Verified fraud page
or threat source

~~~
thejournalizer
Can you access it through the https version?

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pav3l
They don't seem to support https, so no.

~~~
thejournalizer
We do <https://ureddit.com/>

~~~
brokenparser
You attempted to reach ureddit.com, but instead you actually reached a server
identifying itself as <http://ureddit.com>. This may be caused by a
misconfiguration on the server or by something more serious. An attacker on
your network could be trying to get you to visit a fake (and potentially
harmful) version of ureddit.com.

You should not proceed, especially if you have never seen this warning before
for this site.

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guscost
Pioneers!

