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!
Show HN: Find a Study Buddy for your MOOC
11–20 of 66 posts
Re: Show HN: Find a Study Buddy for your MOOC
#12I 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!
Re: Show HN: Find a Study Buddy for your MOOC
#13This 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…
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?
Re: Show HN: Find a Study Buddy for your MOOC
#14Wonderful 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 val…
I hope this can be a valuable a resource as well! Thanks for giving this a look!
Re: Show HN: Find a Study Buddy for your MOOC
#15That 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.
Re: Show HN: Find a Study Buddy for your MOOC
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is something I can work on. Screenshots are something I could easily add. Would it help if I put some screenshots on the home page? Guest access would be a bit hard, but definitely doable as well.
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 i…
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!
Re: Show HN: Find a Study Buddy for your MOOC
#17I 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!
We're always looking for suggestions for new courses to add! I will take a look at this and see what we can do!
If you want, you can email me a way to contact to you at admin@stacks.courses and I can give you an update when we add this course!
Re: Show HN: Find a Study Buddy for your MOOC
#18Small 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)
I will take a look at this. Thanks for the heads up!
Re: Show HN: Find a Study Buddy for your MOOC
#19Great work!
..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!
Re: Show HN: Find a Study Buddy for your MOOC
#20I knew that I've seen somewhere[1] the icon from your landing. [1] https://getpolarized.io/
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