I almost entirely prefer pre-recorded classes to live ones, except for being able to meet classmates and study together. You can watch at your own discretion, change playback speed, etc.
I think there is a big opportunity with ideas like this to make online lectures feel less isolated.
Why restrict it to Stanford? Why not include MIT, Berkeley, etc? BTW these are not CS lectures (all this startup stuff is not CS, like say algorithms, os internals, database systems, ML theory, etc)
EDIT: I like the idea very much, but not in its current form.
This is strictly a content issue. I wouldn't apply demerits to the concept based on the selection of content available.
It should expand, but forced limitations on available content make sense -- it concentrates students into "rooms" while the site's traction is still light, allowing the desired levels of collaboration to come to fruition. Too much content while the site is small risks running only one or two students per room, which keeps the true purpose of the site from showing itself and may even defeat the concept before it has a chance to thrive.
I'm simply judging from the titles but I also don't see anything that directly relates to CS. Could you mention a couple of titles that you think relate to CS?
It is. Going deeper into particular topics or having folks share additional resources has been incredibly valuable. The lectures serve as conversation-food and not the 'core' of the experience here. That's the premise of the experiment.
This would be kind of like watching someone play a videogame on Twitch— indeed, you could just about implement this as a Twitch channel where people turn up and watch a taped lecture together.
This is awesome ! As a largely self-educated engineer I recall feeling (and still do) that most of what I was missing from taking online courses was the « lecture hall » feeling, having discussion immediately afterwards, &c. Nice work !
Great idea, and love how you've integrated advertising. I love that there's a schedule - following the paradox of choice, I hate choosing, and you have a good selection of videos.
Brings in a whole can of worms: how do you measure engagement? Is it gameable? What happens if someone games the system and gets by far the largest weight in the system?
As we're watching Sam Altman on Startups, a group of 4 or 5 people (including myself) have been doing collaborative note taking on Google Docs. Its fun to do! Maybe this is something the devs can bake into their platform as a feature...
This reminds me of twitch in some ways which I feel is a good thing. The use of a schedule is a nice add in to give the appearance of a channel or live stream yet with something to look forward to or schedule appropriately.
I think you just made me realize the value a lot of people get from twitch (and even YouTube, to a certain extent). Which, as a bit of a text fascist, I've had trouble grasping / not really been interested in.
From the love (young) people have for live media/streams - and research into the negative effect of recorded vs live, in person lectures - it seems obvious that "twitch for lectures" will be huge.
Probably not something I'll like any more than unscripted TV series, but probably still huge.
Then again, I do seem to relate to chatting on irc while watching regular scheduled TV (like a buffy episode).
So I do see social/group-interactive viewing as something that'll be great.
Even see this working for stuff like video courses in 3d/game design, development - like an art class. The video is the lecturer, and you can see what 3d models/apps/.. your fellow students create (and how). And maybe even copy/"fork" in real-time.
It looks like the page is embedding a YouTube video with a specified start time in an iframe, with that specified start time based on when the page was loaded.
It's really not that hard to provide local times on the schedule page. I have no idea without doing a Google search what time it is in UTC. Also, is the current class title displayed somewhere?
I also created something similar. People were really interested at first. But we learned after sometime that people loose interest when learning with strangers. We could not retain people after a week of sign up. Although this is bit different so might work. Good luck to people who created this.
Can't scroll to the bottom of the schedule on chrome / Android. It only goes down to something about Dropbox (it's cut off.) Is this the wrong schedule entirely? Do the CS lectures come after the point where it stops scrolling?
Looks really interesting. Could possible be something like facebook live or insta live where you could still have prerecorded stuff available through links as well and have live comments based on time stamps through the lecture videos.
I almost entirely prefer pre-recorded classes to live ones, except for being able to meet classmates and study together. You can watch at your own discretion, change playback speed, etc.
I think there is a big opportunity with ideas like this to make online lectures feel less isolated.