Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Looking for a simple solution for building an online course

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 38 posts

Re: Ask HN: Looking for a simple solution for building an online course

#21
post #15
post #13

I could write a novel about this because I've been creating courses since 2015 but I'm going to keep it short. I've tried a lot of platforms and teachable.com is by far the best solution as of today if you don't have a requirement where you expect people to upload code and then run automated tests against it. I currently use thinkific.com for my courses because over a year ago I made that decision and switching betwe…

Why are you writing your own solution? Is it just for fun? I was under impression that there are tons of opensource available platforms to host courses.

Before I made a decision to go with Thinkific I asked some of my students to try out Moodle's demo site and the feedback I got from them was very negative. The general census was it was too complicated and confusing to navigate their UI and their video player is really really bad. For a video course, a good video player is very important.

edX is a little better, but it's still not what I want from a course platform and the amount of effort it would take to trim it down would be more effort than writing my own platform.

I also looked at a bunch of WP plugins that are advertised as "course platform in a box" and none of them looked appealing. The UI for all of them were very poor and these plugins are massive beasts. I don't want to spend my time hacking through someone elses WP plugin to customize it.

After looking at so many platforms and solutions I eventually came to the conclusion that no matter what platform I choose i'm never going to be truly happy.

If I went with Teachable from day 1, I think I would have been 80% happy and may not have even decided to build my own platform, but at the end of the day, the heart wants what the heart wants. I want to build my own platform and I can do it. Being at ease mentally (even if it means working harder) is more important to me than anything.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for a simple solution for building an online course

#22
post #3

Maybe look at Jupyter Notebook? It does much of this out of the box, but may not be exactly what you are looking for. http://jupyter.org/about

nbgrader is a "A system for assigning and grading Jupyter notebooks." https://github.com/jupyter/nbgrader

jupyter-edx-grader-xblock https://github.com/ibleducation/jupyter-edx-grader-xblock

> Auto-grade a student assignment created as a Jupyter notebook, using the nbgrader Jupyter extension, and write the score in the Open edX gradebook

... networkx is a graph library written in Python which has pretty good docs: https://networkx.github.io/documentation/stable/reference/

There are a few books which feature networkx.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for a simple solution for building an online course

#24

DataCamp has DataCamp Teach ( https://www.datacamp.com/teach ), which allows you to create your own interactive content. Disclaimer: I work for DataCamp Edit : there's also a 'light' version available: https://github.com/datacamp/datacamp-light

What’s the pricing for the course builder? I only see pricing info for your courses.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for a simple solution for building an online course

#26
post #14

I'm using the Autolab project from CMU, and I'm quite satisfied. You'll need a couple machines to self host, and run the student's code. http://www.autolabproject.com Features: Autograding Grade any assignment in any language using any software package. Instantly. Scoreboards Encourage healthy competition with a real-time rank ordered scoreboard. Code Annotation Augment the autograde with additional feedback directly…

Thank you. Judging by the description it's what I'm looking for. I couldn't find a demo, so I'm not sure whether it satisfies the requirements or not, but I will definitely try it.

Re: Ask HN: Looking for a simple solution for building an online course

#30
post #14

I'm using the Autolab project from CMU, and I'm quite satisfied. You'll need a couple machines to self host, and run the student's code. http://www.autolabproject.com Features: Autograding Grade any assignment in any language using any software package. Instantly. Scoreboards Encourage healthy competition with a real-time rank ordered scoreboard. Code Annotation Augment the autograde with additional feedback directly…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN