Ask HN: Are you willing to teach free classes

[xucian]

hey guys

I'm curious what % of professionals would love the idea of traveling to another country to teach their skills for free (similarly to how YouTubers teach for 'free')

there are a lot of people left behind in this AI era. I'd like to create a win-win-win platform for this and somebody suggested I first make a survey to see if enough teachers/tutors/professionals share my drive to fix education, so here it is: https://rockstart.ai/pre-mvp-survey-tutors

I'm not sure where I can find people to help me with the survey, as this is not necessarily targeted towards teachers/coaches, but anyone that actually works in a particular field and is interested in teaching others for free (for various reasons, being social good, indirect travel benefits as in couchsurfing, more recognition, more indirect consulting gigs, private paid 1:1s with the students, -- there are many ways to attack this, thus why I put up the survey)

[elmerfud]

I'm confused by your proposal a little bit. Are you asking what percentage of professionals could afford to travel the world at their own expense and teach others their professional skills for zero compensation? Or are you asking how many professionals would enjoy the idea of teaching classes that for the students are free but they still receive some sort of compensation for their travel and time?

Because while YouTube is free to view content creators definitely have an incentive program. The additional thing with YouTube is that the barrier for entry is very low. Largely the cost for entry is simply time because you have everything else you need.

I would like to be able to travel the world and teach others but I simply could not do it without compensation, at least not at this point in my life. The type of wealth independence that it takes to do something like that is very rare. Those that generally have that type of wealth independence are also typically looking to use it in a philanthropic way to gain some notoriety for themselves.

Also sorry but not sorry not going to sign in to fill out a survey.

[xucian → elmerfud]

the 2nd option

yes, I've been navigating the solution space for this complex problem since '22. just went full-time on it since Jan this year and I came up with what I think is a decent first iteration

the idea is basically teach for free and find a way to crowdfund the course (students might sometimes help with that, which won't make the course absolutely free, but quite close to free), and in case of local or exclusively online courses, expenses are much lower, thus less of a headache

all this will theoretically pay off, it's a long-game. 1:1 private sessions, connections, consultancy opportunities, book sales

it's definitely not for everyone, it's quite a niche thing (which I really like because it won't compete with any other platform in particular). I think it's a real gem, but I firs have to find a way to get at least 100 responses on my survey

oh, so people are put off by the sign in? I actually only added it to prevent abuse, I'm not requiring email collection. thanks for letting me know, I just disabled it

[gus_massa → xucian]

Why are you planing to do this internationaly? Can't it be done locally?

What is the target? Kids in school? Young students starting the university? Young proffesionals?

How are you going to select the teachers? Some people have a lot of knowdledge, but are bad teachers.

[xucian → gus_massa]

why internationally: of course starting locally is easier, will first do it in my city, gather feedback and iterate

courses: no, this is post k12 and similar. it's highly targeted on a specific skill. for example, game dev with Unity (the course that I'll teach locally, as the first tutor user of my own platform), after which you should be able to create your own projects, grow a portfolio and with some luck (sometimes with tutor's help) get an internship somewhere

basically, zeroing in on immediately-applicable skills in life. you can also have a 1-week course on changing your car's oil and other car stuff -- it should be immediately obvious how you'll use those skills, not just theory

teachers: I'll manually reach out currently, but once the platform grows they'll start as 'unverified' with some limited options, and there'll be a rigorous selection process to get verified. regardless of this, each course and each subsequent edit will be checked by us (will delegate some of the checks to gpt). this reminds me of YouTube's early days where most of the work was removing porn, but they've made it. vetting the first 100 tutors is doable. after that, we're already very close to PMF if not past it