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Comment by ralmidani | Hacker News Reader

I'm Ragheed Al-midani, one of uMOOC's two co-founders. I met my co-founder, Dwayne Kennemore, when we were both in CS50 at Harvard Extension School. uMOOC was his idea (he will probably share his inspiration here shortly), and I offered to help. The first prototype of uMOOC was built as our final project for CS50, but the scope of the project has grown tremendously since then.

If you're wondering what our stack looks like, we're using (among other things) Python 3, Django, Django-Rest-Framework, Ember-CLI, Emblem, Sass (the original, indented version), Bootstrap, CoffeeScript, and EasyRTC.

If you have any questions or concerns, technical or otherwise, please don't hesitate to ask!

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This is an awesome idea! I've been toying with something similar for a while. Have you considered moving past a MOOC model to something more like an apprenticeship?

While the pricing model would be different, it might allow for a more personalized learning experience and a relationship between tutor and tutee. Either way, I love that you are making self motivated learning more accessible.

There is a startup called Springboard that is working on something like that, although I do not understand all the details. I agree - that is an awesome idea - the domain here is restricted to MOOCs because it's closed form and standardized, where tutors can be recruited for their expertise in a given course. An apprenticeship requires, I think, a much broader approach to what constitutes a "match" between both parties, and the interactions would need to be facilitated in a completely different way.

This is very cool! Have you considered implementing group sections.

That way, students can pay less and tutors can earn more. If 10 students pay $10/hr, that's $100/hr for the tutor, and the students would still benefit immensely.

Thank you for the compliment and suggestion!

We will definitely consider group sections for a future iteration of the platform. As you said, this would be beneficial for all parties involved.

By the way, on uMOOC, tutors keep 80% of their hourly rate, from day one.

Hello, I'm Dwayne Kennemore, the other founder of uMOOC.

A group section would be terrific for another reason - in academic contexts, while students DO learn from their professors, they learn from ONE ANOTHER as much or more. There are a few reasons for this, but one of them is, I think, that they're more at ease with one another and don't have to worry about looking bad - this openness helps ideas flow more freely.

Group functionality would make that dynamic possible, further replicating the network that occurs in real life, in cyberspace.

You are already anticipating v2.0.

Won't it then just become an online class? How will you differentiate?

Think of it like a breakout session of an online class rather than an online class itself. Why is that useful, you may ask... Having a group and sense of connection helps keep people motivated.

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