
Apply HN: EdXengine-Online Education Driven by Community,Competition and Ranking - epsn
What we do
At EdXengine we are building an online competition platform where engineers can showcase their skill level on a particular skill set (software or area), (Mechanical, Manufacturing, Civil, Electrical and Industrial-initial target group)<p>How this works
If you are a Mechanical engineer concentrating on Computational Fluid Dynamics, there will be a challenge ladder for you which starts from basic level and increases in difficulty as you progress through each level. Depending on the software (ex: Matlab or ANSYS), your skill level for that particular software and area will be ranked. Leaderboard will showcase how you rank amongst other users for the same skill set.<p>Where we are: 
We started as an online educational platform (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edxengine.com&#x2F;) providing courses for the engineering categories I mentioned above. We have reached 856 users in 3.5 months, 163 of them are paid.<p>We tried out our Challenge ladder and leaderboard amongst 120 users in one of our popular course and noticed a unique trend. With this introduction we have had higher engagement in our coursework. Completion ratio for challenges has grown up to 60% ( https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edxengine.com&#x2F;course&#x2F;4a1c5c71&#x2F;)<p>Going ahead:
Presently each student pays and enrolls in the course (60$avg) which has the challenge ladder as a part of the curriculum.<p>Moving forward we want to make the Challenge ladder a free tool, any user can compete.
We want to bring a skill based ranking system through our Challenge ladder.<p>How do we make money?
We have had initial conversations with few manufacturing companies who have been interested in top ranked candidates (3 interviewed by FLSmidth). The ranking parameters will help companies to find quality talent.
Users can pay and enroll for the courses to learn and compete.<p>Co Founders: Surya, Sarang and Lakshman. We all are Mechanical Engineering alums from UW-Madison<p>Questions and Thoughts please.
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brudgers
The name implies an affiliation with EdX, curious if one exists and if not is
there an alternative name in the wings?

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sharemywin
I don't know that I would make all of the challenges free. probably just the
level one.

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epsn
At the moment we are thinking of building a community first, so we are having
the challenges free. The thought process is to provide Quality challenges that
attracts top talents to solve them, thus turning it into a community of people
who like to solve interesting problems and compete with each other.

But what you mentioned might be something we can implement if we have a lot of
users.

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sharemywin
are all the users students? how many different schools?

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epsn
Yes all of the users are students. We are in 3 schools, primarily based in
Chennai, India.

