Show HN: Podium – Listen to clips and highlights from university classes | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Podium – Listen to clips and highlights from university classes

podiumedu.com

6 pointsBretts895 comments

Hey Guys, I’m one of the founders of Podium, a university streaming platform that lets anyone listen to the best parts of university classes. We differ from MOOCs in the sense that you can listen to content that’s most relevant to you rather than having to take an entire course. For example, if you’re interested in entrepreneurship you can find and stream 2 to 5 minute clips on “product market fit” or “raising capital” rather than taking a 4 week course. You can also listen to the full courses and classes if you choose.

We’re doing this by building out a 2-sided platform where professors can go to record their classes with our web recorder, and where users can go to stream those classes with our web player.

Hey Bretts89, this seems cool! I'm curious, who expressed that they wanted this? It's an interesting place between a MOOC and a podcast, just curious why this intersection was interesting to you?

Did you make it for you? Friends? And is there a reason you picked audio as a medium?

We looked at the user data around MOOCs and saw completion rates hovering in the single digits. Most people are exploring different classes, universities rather than doing deep dives on full courses. We even spoke with a former administrator at Princeton who helped form their partnership with Coursera and they admitted that MOOCs fall short in catering to this type of learner. We built Podium to cater to the 90% + of learners using MOOCs who want to explore content and listen to what's relevant to them. I had this problem myself which is why I'm passionate about this. Initially audio is the simplest way for professors to DIY record their classes. Capturing video brings a lot more complexity also some legal hurdles with images in slides, access for the blind, etc.

Very cool! I've been thinking of building something similar but never got around to it. I've always wanted something like that for Youtube or Khan Academy videos where I can fastforward to the "tags" I want, and where the videos/lectures would automatically skip over the tags/sections I already know.

suggestions:

-root url / Home should be where I can search audio, not that corporate/description page. when i go to podiumedu.com i want to be able to search for the audio right away. It took me a few seconds to figure out i had to click on "Player"

- Should be able to see audio without having to login

- URLs: it'd be sick if i could send a link to a friend "podiumedu.com/Idea+To+Product" and it show them a list of the audios with that tag

- The images for courses takes up way too much real estate. I went to this course "https://www.podiumedu.com/player/#!/course/5930b2fcdbc7c250c... and all i saw was the image, the title, and one row on the table. (I'm using a Surface Pro 4)

-x2 speed like Youtube/Audible would be nice

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