

Codecademy Becomes A Platform: Now Anyone Can Write Programming Tutorials - zds
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/30/codecademy-becomes-a-platform-now-anyone-can-write-programming-tutorials/

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takosuke
Everybody here is complaining about the money thing but I'm just bothered that
the "platform" seems to be paradoxically...not programmable enough. I mean,
there's been a lot of criticism about codeacademy's populist ambitions lately,
and the core of them to me is that you can't bridge regular johny's knowledge
to programming knowledge by just presenting them with an esoteric text
adventure in a javascript command line. People can't be so easily compelled to
play text adventures nowadays, especially if the game commands don't relate at
all to their everyday language and experience. I think in order to produce
succesful learning experiences for noobs, which is what they seem to be
aspiring to (I mean, maybe Mayor Bloomberg has a hacker soul, who knows), you
have to give them a real inmediate need for it. Like - when Myspace forced
everybody to learn to get under the hood to customize their profiles. Myspace
created more programming literacy among non-coders than I think Codeacademy
ever could if it remained like this! They have to offer fundamentally
different ways of giving lessons if they really want to get there, other than
command line games. Someone out there mentioned ifttt.com being a better way
to learn about programming basics and getting people interested in the
possibilities. I can think of a few others.

As I said I have not looked too much into what their lesson framework looks
like, but if they offer a choice between js, ruby and python...that's already
too narrow. If """we""" want to educate the general population about
programming, it has to be way broader than that, and the framework that
supports such education has to be more programmable

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jacobrobbins
Mayor Bloomberg was a hacker actually. He started out working in a financial
company, saw a need for a better way of getting information and quit to build
the Bloomberg terminals which turned into the Bloomberg company.

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pg_bot
"The site doesn’t have any current plans to pay contributors, but to help
incentivize users to write high-quality courses, Codecademy aims to provide
significant exposure to the best lesson creators."

You should figure out a way to do this right now, you have a product that
makes me say "shut up and take my money" and I have no way of giving it to
you. Instead I give money to your competitors (codeschool, treehouse, etc.)
for similar services. If you have already developed the platform to create
courses open it up so people can make content and get paid.

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paul7986
Etc = <http://trybloc.com>, <http://CodePupil.com> ... Anyone know others ?

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petercooper
<http://udemy.com/> <http://codelesson.com/> (from both ends, earn money as a
course director, spend money as the student :-))

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techiferous
"The site doesn’t have any current plans to pay contributors, but to help
incentivize users to write high-quality courses, Codecademy aims to provide
significant exposure to the best lesson creators."

I know Ruby very well (programming with it since 2006) and I have been
professionally trained as a teacher. Yet "significant exposure" is not an
incentive for me. I already have enough exposure to get the programming gigs
that I want. My incentives would either be (1) money or (2) the joy of
teaching. Since I have hardly any free time, my only incentive would be (1)
money.

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ScottWhigham
"significant exposure" is, always has, and always will be a draw to teens and
20-somethings. It loses its luster as we move into our 30s and has zero draw
in the 40s and later (at least in professional circles). But, it's like the
line from the movie "Dazed and Confused": "You know what I like about high
school girls? I keep getting older but they stay the same age." There's always
new blood out there willing to exchange blood, sweat, and tears for
"significant exposure".

What sites like CodeAcademy, et al have to worry about is maintaining the
quality of training from one batch of "not burned out yet" trainers to the
next. Because if you aren't paying people, "significant exposure" only has a
short life span.

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alexhawdon
This could potentially be an awesome platform for tool/framework developers to
implement the 'tutorial' sections of their offerings.

Like it

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MengYuanLong
Disclaimer: I don't know enough about the legality/planned dev of CodeAcademy
to know if this is actually feasible.

It seems like one of the best ways to compensate creators (and support another
young company) would be to integrate the flattr platform. members, would
create CodeAcademy lessons and at the end/completion of each lesson, users
would be prompted to rate the course, write a few sentences of feedback (e.g.
"What was the most interesting part of the lesson? What did you learn? What do
you still have difficulty understanding?) and then are asked to click the
flattr button and flatter the course author if they feel it benefited them.

Benefits include payment to authors, another metric to evaluate course
quality, and a payment scheme that doesn't feel like it is draining your
user's wallet.

Though again, I defer to my disclaimer.

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skrebbel
"Now Anyone Can Write Programming Tutorials"

Nice move, but there's something about the article title that rubs me the
wrong way.

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xd
And I'm put off by the restriction on which languages you can teach with.

Anyone know why it is restricted to Javascript, Ruby and Python?

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skrebbel
Ever tried codecademy? They teach by real-time evaluating your code. They just
haven't built the real-time Ioke evaluator yet.

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itmag
As someone who is interested in crowdsourced e-learning startups, what are
some good models for user-created content? Ie how to create the content,
curate it, reward it, etc?

