
People paid us $10,000 last week to learn how to program. Lessons learned... - jmtame
http://niroka.posterous.com/people-paid-us-10000-last-week-to-learn-how-t
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Ryanmf
Fwiw:

I hadn't heard of you until I saw this post. I took a look at the website, and
having seen that and read the article decided to sign up. I was immediately
prompted to sign in with Facebook, and I closed the tab.

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choxi
Yep, there's a few people who have requested non-Facebook login. We're working
on it :)

If you'd like you can upvote that feature request here:
<http://niroka.uservoice.com/forums/136707-general>

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ryanhuff
Don't take this the wrong way, but can you explain the thinking on requiring a
Facebook login?

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untog
I don't want to speak for them, but usually you use a Facebook login to save
time. It isn't just a case of making a signup form, you've got confirmation
e-mails, forgotten password functionality, secure password storage, etc. etc.

None of it is insurmountable of course, but using Facebook saves a ton of time
and lets you plug into a load of social features at the same time. Yes, some
people will reject it but they're a small proportion of the average userbase.
A site aimed a HN readers may have a somewhat different proportion, of course.

~~~
meric
You use Facebook login to save _your users'_ time (they don't have to sign up
again), gives you access to _your users'_ photos (those that click a like
button), that you can display publicly to _your other users_. Making a signup
form, setting up confirmation emails, forgotten password, secure password
storage, takes only a good plugin and half a day, but it still wouldn't give
you the social features facebook provide.

Think not of the costs you will incur (they are likely to be small anyway,
relatively speaking), but the benefits you can provide to your users.

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asiekierka
Not everyone has a Facebook account.

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Robin_Message
And Siri doesn't work with Scottish accents — what's your point?

(Mine is that most people do have a Facebook account, or can get one, and you
have to have a cutoff on customers' demands somewhere. For example, it
probably doesn't make business sense to support non-Facebook users before
translating the whole thing into Chinese, Hindi and Russian, at least.)

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tjoff
Am I the only one that thinks it's sad that the opinion above seems to be
widely accepted?

People just don't have any respect for integrity anymore and they don't even
realize that they don't care about it either. And who gives a sh*t about the
non-typical user? Adapt to the typical user and just crap on everyone else.

It's all about fast gains and nothing about quality. No one seems to have
realized that you can have long-term gains by building decent software.

Also, getting Scottish accents to work in Siri is probably a hassle (where you
barely can do it without an accent). Implementing your own registration system
is not. You have no excuse for relying on facebook only for logins and I
loathe you for it. I might be a minority not worth taking into account but I
have a hard time believing you value your users so little that you don't fix
your own registration (relying on facebook says something about you and
fortunately this is still considered something negative (even though most
would use it anyway). Example: spotify).

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Robin_Message
Ouch. I don't necessarily disagree with you. But building a scalable business
is all about (and has always been about) dealing with typical users and
crapping on untypical ones. I mean, look at Paypal—at least here we are
talking about a fairly low-level privacy invasion to sign-up—Paypal freeze
your money for being non-typical.

I agree quality might pay off longer term, but how can you provide quality to
your users if you can't put food on your own table? There are always trade-
offs; at the end of the day, _real artists ship_.

In this specific case, well, implementing a reliable registration system is a
small hassle, maybe two days work to integrate and do well. I made the Siri
example since there are about 6 million Scottish people and its pretty hard
for them to change their accents, so it's hardly a minor issue. Ultimately
everything is a hassle.

One other thing to consider, if you care about users: Facebook login is more
convenient for the average user, so one way not to value your users is _not_
to provide it. Obviously both might be better, but what other feature won't
you get around to instead?

TL;DR they are doing the right thing by choosing a good, easy option for the
MVP. They are accepting feature requests, so if its important and valuable,
they'll do it.

(This is getting long so I should stop, but also, what's so wrong with a
Facebook account? Since it has been shown they collect information on people
who don't have accounts anyway I can't see any meaningful privacy loss from
just getting an account).

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pixcavator
I find this kind of reports very encouraging. I think the future of education
is professors becoming free agents in a free market. Really, why can a lawyer
set up his own firm or a doctor start his own practice and deal with life and
death situations but a professor can’t just teach a few calculus courses
without being affiliated with a university?

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michael_dorfman
_but a professor can’t just teach a few calculus courses without being
affiliated with a university?_

There's nothing stopping a professor from doing just that; there's no legal
requirement that all calculus courses be affiliated with a university.

However, there seem to be some very good reasons (some market-based, in fact)
why this is not the business model most professors choose.

~~~
pixcavator
They can't give course credit or award degrees.

There was a relevant quote posted recently by "tokenadult": “the diligence of
public teachers is more or less corrupted by the circumstances which render
them more or less independent of their success and reputation in their
particular professions.. . . . The privileges of graduation, besides, are in
many countries . . . obtained only by attending the lectures of the public
teachers. . . . The endowment of schools and colleges have, in this manner,
not only corrupted the diligence of public teachers, but have rendered it
almost impossible to have any good private ones." -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of
Nations, Book V, Part 3, Article II (1776)

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anjc
Can somebody please clarify the article for me, they were trying to teach
people, non-programmers, Objective C in a week? I can't imagine teaching non-
programmers 'hello world' to a well understood but basic degree (syntax etc)
in a week, let alone in Objective C, let alone in iOS.

~~~
jeffreymcmanus
It's a very aggressive schedule, and live video (I would argue) doesn't help
-- it simply puts pressure on students to focus nonstop, which is very
challenging.

The CodeLesson iOS course takes four weeks, and it's all time-shifted, so
students can take in the material on a schedule that makes sense to them and
ask the instructor questions any time while the course is in session.

~~~
anjc
Thanks. That sounds like it would be extremely challenging for non-
programmers, if that's who it's targeted at.

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scott_s
Suggestion: if the instructor can also bring in another knowledgeable person,
they can receive real-time email/chat questions, and try to answer them, or
aggregate them in a meaningful way so that the instructor can address them.

I don't know how well this suggestion will work in the general case because it
requires two people who are capable of teaching the course, but it may help.
Particularly if the person fielding real-time questions starts seeing trends.

Also, if you can't do that, maybe you could set up chats with 6 (or so)
students each, who could try to answer each other's questions.

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petercooper
In theory, you could do it with one, if you were prepared to make a leap in
the delivery.

Breaking up a 200 person class into 20 person groups would entail repeating
the same material 20 times. Instead, it could be done live once, then replayed
to those groups. The tutor could then devote all of the text chat time to Q&A
on each live session.

~~~
scott_s
I meant have ad-hoc chat sessions among subsets of the class, to simulate
students whispering questions to each other in a classroom lecture.

I think that what you suggested would eventually become 20 different lectures
- and if you only have 20 people, why not just do a group call?

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rokhayakebe
I have a feeling one of these sites (Niroka, Skillshare, Codecademy etc...)
will be a billion dollar revenue school.

Edit: I have a former colleague who started his own SEO shop a while back.
After getting tired of competing on price, he switched his business model. He
now goes to small companies and charges a minimum of $1000/day to train
employees on SEO (I have no evidence, but I believe him). I can only imagine
how much money the above companies will make if they were selling course to
businesses.

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hugh3
_I have a feeling one of these sites (Niroka, Skillshare, Codecademy etc...)
will be a billion dollar revenue school_

A billion dollars a year? How are they going to manage that? How many people
out there _want_ to learn to program computers, and how much are they willing
to pay for it?

One million customers per year at a thousand dollars a pop? One hundred
thousand customers a year at ten thousand dollars a pop? Ten million customers
a year at a hundred bucks a pop?

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rokhayakebe
One will end up getting some type of accreditation. When it happens they will
go from delivering one-off courses and concentrate on delivering degrees.
Someone pays maybe $9,000 to get his BS online. Maybe a mega-corporation pays
$1000 per employee to take a 3-day-Hadoop course, etc...

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meric
How do you know, rather than doing that, they wouldn't just reduce a multi-
billion dollar industry to a 50 million dollar industry, with all 50 million
going to them?

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rokhayakebe
I just think that it is a likely outcome. What you say is also possible.

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sireat
Hmm, I guess I was the only one who got a Pop-up asking for e-mail with no
obvious close button.

This was on regular Firefox with a few plugins.

