

Ask HN: What do you think of the idea – the social network for education - kuvkir

Hello!<p>I'm thinking of an idea of a social networking education website. Many online educational projects such as Youtube EDU, iTunes U or Academic Earth have great content but lack social networking features. I believe the "social" part is very important in the process of learning things when you can interact with classmates and instructors, ask questions and get answers. So that not only you can browse and watch education materials, but also the community will play an important role in the learning process.<p>Do you know any websites that already offer these features?<p>There are good examples of the execution of this idea for particular areas like italki.com for english learning or www.jamplay.com for guitar playing. But I'm thinking bigger, so it'd be for fundamental university disciplines like computer science or mathematics.<p>I don't want to build another useless social network, I'm more on the way to research what is already available, how existent solutions can be enhanced.
======
JeanPierre
Do you think of learning management systems
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_learning_management_sys...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_learning_management_systems)),
or do you think about it being open to all?

I know some of those systems has the option for fora, and my experiences with
those has just been good. If you're looking for good ways to work with an
open-for-all system, I suggest looking at the most used fora in e.g.
mathematics and physics, and then take some ideas from there.

A problem I suppose you might encounter is that most schoolkids use this
networking site just to solve their homework: At least that's what they do
now. If you could somehow change that problem into a way of making them
interested in learning how one solve those problems (instead of making other
solve them), then you've got a great idea.

~~~
kuvkir
I think of it as a open-for-all online university, in the beginning at least
for Russian speaking students as I have access to many Russian universities
and professors who might like to participate.

Regarding the problem of schoolkids misusing the community to solve their
homework, if the project is targeted for people who really want to learn
something, doing so is cheating themselves. Also, for university students I
believe the effect of this problem is not so evident as in middle schools.

~~~
JeanPierre
Well, if you're backed up by professors, then this sounds promising.

What I would start with if I was working with this issue, is how to present
the information for the students in the best way. At least for me, linear
algebra and physics becomes way simpler with good visualisations/videos. If
you could somehow make it easier for professors to present the content well,
then you have a good start for a good website. So, all in all: Find out what
makes people learn the easiest - I'm pretty sure there are some studies out
there elaborating _the_ way to teach students. If you make this way of
teaching students easy to do on your website, I'm pretty sure that this idea
might work out well.

~~~
kuvkir
Good point, will think on that.

------
jtheory
I've been thinking about this in terms of my own (7-year-old) educational
website: <http://eMusicTheory.com> \-- interactive online drills for music
theory students/teachers.

The entire experience would be much more interesting for students if they
could compete with friends (like with apps on facebook, for example), but I'm
not sure making yet another FB app is a good idea here, plus you'd be stuck
competing with other music theory students.

My half-baked idea is a central educational social networking site in which
you could earn education points by achieving scores on lots of different
member sites, not just mine... so a music theory whizkid might use their
stats/achievements/reputation/karma/whatever to compete with their math nerd
friend, even though they're focusing on entirely different specialties.
There'd have to be rough equivalency in the effort involved to achieve points
on different sites, but that's not a big hurdle (and weighting could be
adjusted automatically based on students' relative speed of advancement.. if
students tend to go tearing through achievements on a given site, the value of
its points would be reduced in the global stats).

I'll dig through some of the sites linked above when I have time, but at the
moment nothing seems to match up with this concept.

Is this a good idea? (Is there anything out there heading in this direction? I
don't have the time to develop it myself currently, though I'd happily offer
tons of advice).

------
benwerd
It's worth looking at what OpenCourseWare are doing, as well as university-
centric networks like the British Open University's OpenLearn.

I co-founded an educational social network called Elgg.net in 2004 (which
later became Eduspaces.net when Elgg's scope grew from education into an open
source social networking platform for all), and I've been watching this space
carefully. There have been quite a few services which have been and gone that
have followed the model you've outlined, but that doesn't mean you won't be
able to build something that works.

The biggest deal, in my opinion, is always this: find a way to make it work
for the first user. Build it around existing educational resources, or tools
for an individual to learn, and then let the community enhance that initial
offering. Otherwise you've got one hell of an uphill battle ahead of you.
(Pertinent examples include Flickr and Delicious which both allow you to store
and share resources, but are so much more when millions of people are also
participating.)

~~~
benwerd
NB: I should have mentioned that I've moved on from Elgg and EduSpaces, and am
not able to speak for either project.

~~~
glen
We are building this very thing at www.nixty.com. Benwerd, I'm familiar with
Elgg and have actually consulted with Harold Jarche a few times (several years
ago). If either of you are interested, then I'd love to hear your thoughts and
feedback. Please send me an email at glen at nixty dot com.

~~~
benwerd
I can't speak for Harold - although we've spoken, he's never directly been
involved with Elgg or me - but I'd love to. I'll drop you an email now.

------
imp
I've built a website to do that! It's called Curious Reef
<http://curiousreef.com/> and I launched it a few months ago. People have been
steadily learning a variety of subjects together since then.

The most active class so far is MIT's OCW 6.00, Intro to Computer Science:
[http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-
opencourseware-600-introduc...](http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-
opencourseware-600-introduction/)

There are others learning Vim, SICP, bash, etc. I'm also experimenting with a
guitar class.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the site. My goals when designing the site
were exactly as you have described above.

~~~
kuvkir
Seems very promising. I like the slogan – "explanatory social learning".

How many users do you have at this moment?

Have you contacted content owners to ask them for permission to place the
videos directly on your website? It'd be awesome if you can do so.

~~~
imp
Thanks, there's over 1200 registered users, but I wouldn't quote that as
active users. The site got redditted when it launched and there's some people
who signed up initially and haven't been back. I don't have a number for
active users off the top of my head, but there's always someone submitting
homework, writing a comment, or starting a discussion every day.

I haven't looked into hosting content yet. I feel that others do that pretty
well already, but it would be more convenient to have it all in one place.
What type of content do you think would be most beneficial to be hosted on
Curious Reef? Embedded videos, PDFs, etc? Or are you thinking of something
like replicating the content of all of OCW's classes?

~~~
kuvkir
Maybe not hosting content yourself, but embed it somehow into your website.

------
kylemathews
I'm leading a project doing exactly this, building an open source social
learning platform on Drupal. You can check it out at <http://eduglu.com>. I
made my second release yesterday -
[http://kyle.mathews2000.com/blog/2010/06/01/second-
release-e...](http://kyle.mathews2000.com/blog/2010/06/01/second-release-
eduglu)

Things are early on still so if you wanted to pitch in, you could be a lot of
help.

~~~
kuvkir
Thanks for suggestion, will definitely look at it.

------
kuvkir
Thank everyone for participation. Did some more research and found out two
interesting projects:

<http://smart.fm> – a next generation learning platform from Japan featuring
personalized learning techniques.

<http://grockit.com> – a social learning tool to help students prepare for
SAT, GMAT, etc. With elements of a social game.

------
pavs
I thought about this too, wrote about this a little bit here. Social Network
was just one aspect of my idea.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1351871>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353756>

Don't have money to work on it, right now. :(

------
classroomtv
Yes, Classroom.tv. Based in Palo Alto, we are an early-stage Stanford startup.
Contact me if you want to meet (talent@classroom.tv).

------
alaithea
There's <http://curiousreef.com/> (formerly Crunch Course).

------
jmathai
We just released Student Revolt which adds a social network to existing
courses. You can see a screencast of how it works on the home page.

<http://www.studentrevolt.com/>

------
ritonlajoie
In France we have beebac, it's a great website, very useful. (url :
<http://www.beebac.com>). I'm not sure about the US-friendly educational
social networks..

~~~
kuvkir
A very interesting project, will look at it.

------
iamdave
Moodle.com

------
mkuhn
Have a look at <http://www.supercoolschool.com/>

Is it what you were thinking about?

~~~
kuvkir
Thanks, that seems interesting. But it is only a platform for creating online
educational communities, correct me if I'm wrong. I'm more thinking of a
service that is a combination of great educational content with an active
community, that help a student throughout the learning process.

------
riffer
It's not a bad idea; might be tough to monetize

