This is awesome! Are you familiar with the plus/equals/minus learning concept? Unfortunately I can't recall the exact term used when I first read about it and google isn't helping. It basically says the most effective way to master a subject is to have a:
"Plus" - someone who knows more about the subject than you, has more experience than you, can act as a mentor and resource for you and answer questions.
"Equal" - a study buddy at about the same level as you to work through problems together and challenge each other to make sure you both understand the material. This is the person you go to when you initially don't understand something and you try to figure it out together. If you're both stumped after you're spent some time with the issue that's when it's time to ask the "Plus."
"Minus" - Someone who doesn't have as much experience or subject matter knowledge as you do. You act as a mentor/resource for this person answering questions and explaining concepts. This in turn helps to solidify your understanding of the material.
I've long thought it would be beneficial to incorporate this concept into online learning and your platform looks like it has all of the information to make it happen. In addition to study buddy recommendations would you consider adding the ability to pair people currently taking the class with people who have completed the class who are willing to be a resource? I would guess the "Equal" is the most important component and your system tackles that but there might be significant value to users in adding the Plus/Minus as well.
I have not heard of this concept, but I think that's a great model for learning!
Our algorithm favors matches for people that are both currently taking a course - so you are correct in that the "Equal" is the most important component that our system tackles. However, it also does suggest matches for people that are in different stages of the course. It might make a suggestion for someone who is taking a course with someone who has completed it - and vice versa.
In the future, I've thought about adding a Q&A component to the site. And I think that would that could help with the "Plus/Minus" aspect of learning.
Maybe it might also be helpful to have a feature where you could ask to have the algorithm favor "Plus/Minus" matches?
I almost feel like that's out of scope for your project. The "plus/minus" dynamic plays out organically on places like IRC, Stackoverflow, etc. Whereas finding an equal is somewhat harder.
That might be true. I think it might be bordering out of scope for the "Find Study Buddies" feature, but I've thought about potentially adding a Q&A feature to the site in the future, which might be more in scope with the site in general and also address the "Plus/Minus" component.
What a great concept! I had not heard of it before, but thinking back to my university days, I seem to have had people in the plus, equal and minus categories around me, and they played a big part in helping me get through my degree. I like to think I was the plus/equal/minus for someone else!
this is also how i imagine villiages and tribes passed down knowledge, traditions and stories. small children learn from older children, who learn from young adults, who learn from older adults, who learn from the elders.
That looks like a great thing to me. One thing that bothers me though is that you have to hand over your full name and email address before you can even see what functionality this website provides. I would prefer if there was some kind of guest access or at least some screenshots of the interface.
"Add courses to your profile from our catalog"
I'd need to see these before signing up. The picture of the books on the shelf seems to imply you can use MOOCs from popular sites but "our catalog" sounds proprietary.
This is something I can add. Our catalog currently consists of all courses from Coursera, edX, Udacity, Udemy, and The Great Courses! Maybe I should also fix that wording as well.
Ahh I see. Then I would use something closer to what you just wrote there:
Works with Coursera, EdX, Udacity, The Great Courses, and Udemy courses.
I'd actually recommend changing the tagline on the site, as well, to be more clear: "Find the perfect study buddy for all your Coursera, EdX, and Udacity courses."
Our catalog currently consists of all courses from Coursera, edX, Udacity, Udemy, and The Great Courses
Just put that sentence on your site.
It would also be helpful to see "class sizes" for a given course. I don't want to sign up only to find after the fact that nobody is taking the same course as me.
I think it's a really cool service to offer and I could see it really helping a lot of people. Here's my thoughts on it.
The main webpage is possibly too minimal. While minimalism is nice, as it sits currently, it gives the appearance of "not done yet". I would recommend adding more explanation about what a user would expect, maybe some screenshots, user reviews, etc.
It likely feels trivial as the creator but keep in mind that you know a lot more about your service (and your vision) than your users do. The goal of your landing page should be to bridge that gap. This all needs to be done without adding any extra work for your users (including filling out forms).
That helps a lot. This is something that I haven't been keeping in mind. Great suggestions for what to do with the landing page and also some of the best advice for framing how I should think about how a user will see that first page. Much appreciated!
I think it would help, you could also have a link to a separate page where you show screenshots and how it works if you want to keep your landing page minimal.
It's just a trust issue, not in particular with you, but if I come across a website that wants my email address but doesn't clarify what if offers in return, I'm hesitant in giving up that information.
Also it is not clear to me, if my full name would be shared with other users of that page. I certainly don't want my new employer to know that I'm looking for a study buddy for "Java 101" right after accepting that offer for a senior position :)
Also, the assumption that everyone wants to share their last name, or that every one has a last name is erroneous. Some people really don't have a last name (esp. the place I am from there are lots of people with just one name). You might want to change the form to just a "Name" or make last name optional. Unless of course you are legally required to not do so.
You don't have to share your actual last name. Pseudonyms are fine. I didn't think about the case where someone doesn't have a last name. I might need to do something about that.
..I'm going to game the system a bit and ask this thread: Does anyone want to atudy machine learning papers w/me (asynch) and discuss via voice call? Also looking for project partners. Heavy preference for reinforcement learning and computer vision.
<<- even if this works I'll definitely be using your site to find buddies. Thank you!
Hi. I am currently taking David Silver's Reinforcement Learning and Deep Reinforcement Learning Course from Berkeley. I would be very much interested in joining you for reading research papers and possibly working on projects too.
I am about to sign up. However, I will be happy also to study research papers together. Specifically, in RL and I have a slight interest in Quantum Computing as well.
Latest firefox, created account, logged in, went to '_build_ my profile', received what looks like my profile screen, clicked on 'search' for courses, a gray overlay is put in front of the window, then nothing happens. unfocus and refocus window, gray is gone, but comes back when I hit 'search'. unfocus and refocus, grey is gone, selected 'Interested', tried 'search', same gray overlay. Same thing happens with 'search' from the 'Home' page. Result: cannot 'search', not usable in FF.
Same issue in FF incognito mode.
Same issue in Safari.
Same issue in Chrome.
How is this working for anyone?
Oh, wait a minute. The screen goes gray, but the search bar still works. Can I add that this is a bizarre user experience? Had I not been convinced that there might actually be something worthwhile behind this weird gray screen, I would've left and never thought about this again. A simple message 'Use the search bar above to search for courses to add to your profile' would have been more effective for me.
I'm having trouble understanding how this would work. I've got a course in my profile, pinged someone else who was interested, and now we're connected and I can send messages to them and I assume vice-versa. Now what?
How does one 'study' with others over the internet? I'd love to see a 2-player Anki or something like that, but that doesn't seem to be the purpose of this site. This just connects people, which is great, but then... The usefulness of the site seems to 'end' precisely where the work of studying begins. If I can already find a 'study buddy' for some MOOC using the discussion boards on the site, then what is this for?
and yeah, how does one _study_ with others using the internet? Maybe that's the more pertinent question. If I knew the answer to that, maybe the other questions would be obvious.
The gray overlay is supposed to highlight the search bar. It's supposed to make everything on the site gray except for the search bar. Is that not the case for you? Is the search bar also graying out? If so, that's a bug I need to fix. So far I haven't been able to reproduce it on my end, but doesn't mean there isn't a bug.
Stacks isn't promising the ability to study over the Internet necessarily; however, you could if you wanted. For example, you could ask questions via chat. On the other hand, you could meet on Stacks and then move to Skype to study. Or even more, you could potentially meet up in person if you have gotten to know your buddy well enough.
Think of it like how you might think of Tinder. Tinder is called online dating, but you wouldn't necessarily have a date on Tinder.
Thanks. The Tinder comparison is fairly clear, but there's still something nagging at me. Tinder (I think) is partially based on physical location. I suppose there's always "cyber", but that's kinda what I'm talking about. "Cyber", well, cybersex is a very distant and unwanted second-place compared to the real thing. I'm thinking there's something similar here. Studying with someone else, it seems to me, has a strong physical component that requires a face-to-face meeting. I don't remember adding location information to my profile, so I guess your algo doesn't match location? It might be useful when trying to create a study group.
Otherwise, for pair or group studying over the internet, I haven't been satisfied with anything that I've seen. That adds some difficulty to the social interactions once the connections are made, and anything that can be done to ease the introductions would be helpful. For physical meetings, it seems like the initial communication might be 'Hi, I'm so-and-so, if you're interested, we can meet in the student library at 10:00AM', or something like that. For Internet-based studying, I'm not sure how that interaction should go. Something like 'Skype me @mynamehere at 10AM EST and we'll study together' doesn't quite seem right to me, because IMing or IRC seems too cumbersome and slow to be useful for studying. I think I'm just ignorant of the tools that can be useful here, but what I've seen so far appears lacking to me.
Another thing, how do I actually find a list of my buddies? OK, I see them now under 'Notifications'. That's unexpected. I was looking for 'My Buddies' or something like that. I'm not sure what 'Notifications' would be for.
.. and the gray overlay does highlight the search bar, I just didn't immediately notice it. My eye is on the 'Search' button that I just clicked, and that gets covered by the overlay, so it gave me the feeling of 'WTF just happened?'
I sometimes feel like a bit of a dick when I critique the work of others, so I'm thankful that you're not taking this the wrong way. In fact, the only reason why I'm looking at this at all is because I think you've done something cool here, and it's potentially very useful. I think you're doing a good job here, and I hope the best for your project.
That's true, it doesn't match location at the moment, but we may add something like that in the future if that's what people want.
Hopefully as more people sign up, our algorithm will be able to make better study buddy suggestions. Although this isn't a guarantee and is somewhat part of the experiment in launching this site. If our algorithm can't make quality suggestions, then we may have to rethink our strategy.
Studying online is intentionally meant to cover a very broad spectrum of possibilities. It could mean meeting up in person or online to study. It could mean asking and answering questions from time to time in the chat. It could also mean just staying up-to-date with what courses your buddies are taking to help each other stay motivated.
Your list of buddies will show up in notifications, but your full list of buddies will show up on your profile under the Following/Followers section.
You shouldn't feel like a dick lol. All of these concerns and suggestions have been awesome! And they are things that are great for me to be thinking about! I very much appreciate you checking out the project :)
Crap, one more thing I meant to add -- Stanford Lagunita (lagunita.stanford.edu) has a number of interesting courses that you might be interested in indexing.
I know this is for MOOCS but there are lots of great courses that are available online from universities where this would be useful. I'm taking Deep Reinforcement Learning (CS294) from Berkeley.
Adding the option for courses like that would be really helpful!
Wonderful concept. From my experience in distance learning (online courses), lack of human engagement is the #1 problem that leads to dropping a course -- no real human connection. Which is why many universities are investing in using group videoconferencing to allow for genuine group activities in class, every when people are in different towns/states. Anything to help MOOC's in a similar way should be immensely valuable!
Haha that's cool. I had a friend help design my landing page. He mentioned that he used a generic graphic to make that bookshelf. It's cool to see it elsewhere in the wild
That's a good idea. I was planning on sending this out to r/learnprogramming on Monday. I'll have to make sure this makes it to r/cscareerquestions as well
Really great idea! I just signed up and selected "Interested" for many courses but I still don't have any study buddies. How many courses do I need to select? Also, are you planning on maybe including an option to select a subtopic to look for buddies for instead of simply by course?
Our algorithm starts working as soon as you enable the "Find Study Buddies" feature. Also, it starts working anytime you add a new course.
At the moment, it takes about 10 seconds to complete. So if you haven't gotten any suggestions within 1-3 minutes, then there may not be anyone else looking for a study buddy for those courses, yet.
I just launched this feature today, so the number of potential suggestions will be as low as it will ever be. I plan on getting the word out on several different sites, which will increase the number of potential suggestions.
We'll send you an email when you have new suggestions, so you don't need to continuously check back in with the site.
Also, for which courses are you looking for a study buddy? I can make sure I spread the word to people and communities who have similar interests.
Maybe I'm missing something, but why would you look for a study buddy on your site and not in the MOOC discussion forum (because there you will easily find people taking the same course obviously)?
Very good question. I would recommend doing both I suppose. On Stacks, we match you up with buddies based on all of the courses you are interested in rather than just one. So our algorithm may recommend that you match up with someone who is interested in Computer Science, Literature, and Psychology; rather than just matching you up with someone in your Computer Science class.
I think this is a good idea. I've thought about doing something like this for books as well. I haven't yet thought about doing this for programming languages or frameworks, but maybe I should.
Well, some of the courses will have large overlaps.
You might have 5 different courses teaching "intro to python".
Also, if a study group successfully finished an intro course, they might want to take an advanced course together. Or do some non-MOOC advanced learning.
After all, people aren't taking courses in a vacuum. They're taking them as part of a learning path. That path can include additional courses, exercises, projects, and a lot more.
Congratulations Johnny! I enjoyed speaking with you earlier this year, and think the adjustment to “find a study buddy” is a great move. I’m excited to see you moving this forward.
Are they on Coursera or edX? Or are they on they're own platform?
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Ahh! Looks like are hosted own their own sites. I will take a look at adding these. If you want, you can email me (admin@stacks.courses) a way to contact you and I can give you an update when I have added these.
Small quibble: the "... See More" link on course information pages is hard to click on - seems that the clickable part of the link only has height of 1px. Using Firefox 63.0.1 (64-bit)
"Plus" - someone who knows more about the subject than you, has more experience than you, can act as a mentor and resource for you and answer questions.
"Equal" - a study buddy at about the same level as you to work through problems together and challenge each other to make sure you both understand the material. This is the person you go to when you initially don't understand something and you try to figure it out together. If you're both stumped after you're spent some time with the issue that's when it's time to ask the "Plus."
"Minus" - Someone who doesn't have as much experience or subject matter knowledge as you do. You act as a mentor/resource for this person answering questions and explaining concepts. This in turn helps to solidify your understanding of the material.
I've long thought it would be beneficial to incorporate this concept into online learning and your platform looks like it has all of the information to make it happen. In addition to study buddy recommendations would you consider adding the ability to pair people currently taking the class with people who have completed the class who are willing to be a resource? I would guess the "Equal" is the most important component and your system tackles that but there might be significant value to users in adding the Plus/Minus as well.