Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 55 posts

Re: Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

#41

Post by minxomat »

mmackay wrote: post #36
untilHellbanned wrote: post #27

Great idea. Not crazy about the name though because it doesn’t evoke anything. I would consider changing. Why not go all the way with the Shopify analogy and call it Teachify?

μὴ φρόντιζε (don't worry): we have a reason! I used to teach Greek and Latin, and our very first product, Epigrammar, took its inspiration from Classical antiquity: the English word “epigram” comes from “ἐπί” (epi) and “γράφειν” (graphein) meaning “to write upon” (historically, epigrams were written upon household items such as broken pottery or sea shells). With Epigrammar, we wanted to digitize the ancient way of w…

Epihub sounds more like a map of epipen sale points or something like that. Definitely 0 association with teaching.

Re: Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

#42

Post by rexreed »

I'm wondering if this will be useful for an online conference we're putting together where we need to schedule 1:1s with presenters for expert sessions. How customizable is the text that appears (Students, Tutorials, etc. ) that wouldn't be appropriate in a conference setting?

Re: Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

#43

Post by urs »

rexreed wrote: post #42

I'm wondering if this will be useful for an online conference we're putting together where we need to schedule 1:1s with presenters for expert sessions. How customizable is the text that appears (Students, Tutorials, etc. ) that wouldn't be appropriate in a conference setting?

I think it could work, we haven’t tried it for a conference, but email me directly (first name at company name.com) so we can make sure you’re setup right.

To answer your question, not only is every single string of text customizable, but so is every icon. So you can rebrand and redesign it however you please and the interface will update.

Re: Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

#44

Post by urs »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #39
mmackay wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

μὴ φρόντιζε (don't worry): we have a reason! I used to teach Greek and Latin, and our very first product, Epigrammar, took its inspiration from Classical antiquity: the English word “epigram” comes from “ἐπί” (epi) and “γράφειν” (graphein) meaning “to write upon” (historically, epigrams were written upon household items such as broken pottery or sea shells). With Epigrammar, we wanted to digitize the ancient way of w…

epigrammar works as sort of a nice play on words when you consider epigram. But epihub does not. Teachify is much better. The only point against it is it isn't very euphonious but then neither is epihub. Maybe edify, since it is already a word. But I think even so Teachify is better because everyone gets immediately sort of what your problem domain is.

Big Teachify crowd here!

I will say, Epihub was really the byproduct of Epigrammar (as Mike highlighted above) and us just using the term “hub” a lot. It was hard to mispronounce, we had the .com, it felt like an homage to our previous work, and we didn’t think about it too much afterward.

I do like Teachify though. It’s a pretty great name; I can’t lie.

Re: Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

#49

Post by hevelvarik »

This is exciting. Are you planning or do you already provide a mechanism for discovery? Meaning a means to browse the available service providers along with reviews or the like?

I’ve read that Shopify is doing something similar now, and while for them this comes rather late in their product life cycle, for your product I’d think it more important and thus worthy of earlier consideration.

Re: Launch HN: Epihub (YC S20) – Shopify for teaching online

#50

Post by nanna »

A very exciting project and, as a somewhat alienated university instructor I'll be spending time thinking about it's possible uses for me. A couple comments though.

1. 'Sell your class on Zoom' is a total turn-off for me. As is 'Schedule. Meet. Bill.' As a teacher I do not 'sell' education - I'm not a Sophist ;) - I teach, and for that I would ideally like to get paid, but this is not a conventional commodity-based transaction and so the language of sales is jarring. Partly this is semantic, 'sell' may work for wine tasting instructors but not for humanities tutors. But also partly the issue is that I may not want to sell my teaching. Perhaps I am gaining experience, and want to set up a model class, to build experience and confidence?

2. I don't understand why Zoom needs to be so tightly integrated. This isn't just a classic HN comment about Zoom, it's the fact that there's already an excellent learning environment called BigBlueButton out there and it's Jitsi based. Have you considered integrating that?

Post reply on HN