People paid us $10,000 last week to learn how to program. Lessons learned... | Hacker News Reader

People paid us $10,000 last week to learn how to program. Lessons learned...

niroka.posterous.com

114 pointsjmtame39 comments

Fwiw:

I hadn't heard of you until I saw this post. I took a look at the website, and having seen that and read the article decided to sign up. I was immediately prompted to sign in with Facebook, and I closed the tab.

Yep, there's a few people who have requested non-Facebook login. We're working on it :)

If you'd like you can upvote that feature request here: http://niroka.uservoice.com/forums/136707-general

Don't take this the wrong way, but can you explain the thinking on requiring a Facebook login?

I don't want to speak for them, but usually you use a Facebook login to save time. It isn't just a case of making a signup form, you've got confirmation e-mails, forgotten password functionality, secure password storage, etc. etc.

None of it is insurmountable of course, but using Facebook saves a ton of time and lets you plug into a load of social features at the same time. Yes, some people will reject it but they're a small proportion of the average userbase. A site aimed a HN readers may have a somewhat different proportion, of course.

yep, you got it. that pretty much sums up why. although, at least with Rails, there's so many authentication gems that it's comparable to implement Facebook login versus email/password login.

Thanks for the feedback. I am debating this very issue now for an iphone app, and the time savings of not having to build a registration system for v1 is very appealing.

You use Facebook login to save your users' time (they don't have to sign up again), gives you access to your users' photos (those that click a like button), that you can display publicly to your other users. Making a signup form, setting up confirmation emails, forgotten password, secure password storage, takes only a good plugin and half a day, but it still wouldn't give you the social features facebook provide.

Think not of the costs you will incur (they are likely to be small anyway, relatively speaking), but the benefits you can provide to your users.

Not everyone has a Facebook account.

And Siri doesn't work with Scottish accents — what's your point?

(Mine is that most people do have a Facebook account, or can get one, and you have to have a cutoff on customers' demands somewhere. For example, it probably doesn't make business sense to support non-Facebook users before translating the whole thing into Chinese, Hindi and Russian, at least.)

Am I the only one that thinks it's sad that the opinion above seems to be widely accepted?

People just don't have any respect for integrity anymore and they don't even realize that they don't care about it either. And who gives a sh*t about the non-typical user? Adapt to the typical user and just crap on everyone else.

It's all about fast gains and nothing about quality. No one seems to have realized that you can have long-term gains by building decent software.

Also, getting Scottish accents to work in Siri is probably a hassle (where you barely can do it without an accent). Implementing your own registration system is not. You have no excuse for relying on facebook only for logins and I loathe you for it. I might be a minority not worth taking into account but I have a hard time believing you value your users so little that you don't fix your own registration (relying on facebook says something about you and fortunately this is still considered something negative (even though most would use it anyway). Example: spotify).

Ouch. I don't necessarily disagree with you. But building a scalable business is all about (and has always been about) dealing with typical users and crapping on untypical ones. I mean, look at Paypal—at least here we are talking about a fairly low-level privacy invasion to sign-up—Paypal freeze your money for being non-typical.

I agree quality might pay off longer term, but how can you provide quality to your users if you can't put food on your own table? There are always trade-offs; at the end of the day, real artists ship.

In this specific case, well, implementing a reliable registration system is a small hassle, maybe two days work to integrate and do well. I made the Siri example since there are about 6 million Scottish people and its pretty hard for them to change their accents, so it's hardly a minor issue. Ultimately everything is a hassle.

One other thing to consider, if you care about users: Facebook login is more convenient for the average user, so one way not to value your users is not to provide it. Obviously both might be better, but what other feature won't you get around to instead?

TL;DR they are doing the right thing by choosing a good, easy option for the MVP. They are accepting feature requests, so if its important and valuable, they'll do it.

(This is getting long so I should stop, but also, what's so wrong with a Facebook account? Since it has been shown they collect information on people who don't have accounts anyway I can't see any meaningful privacy loss from just getting an account).

Sure, we just wanted users to have a more social experience with our site. With Facebook login, you can show profile pictures and names, and eventually make it easier for friends to take classes together.

> we just wanted users to have a more social experience with our site.

This strikes me as bologna, because right now it's meaningless (see: "eventually" make it easier...).

IMO it's perfectly reasonable to say that you didn't want to roll your own registration system.

Sure, I agree that's a valid reason. It wasn't our reason though, I've worked with Devise on Rails projects many times so implementing that would have been just as easy as implementing Facebook Connect. Honest.

I like meric's response as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3179759

If you've already got all the functionality for Facebook Connect, it doesn't take a whole lot more to add in Google and/or Twitter Oauth. Giving your potential users a number of options is always a good thing.

IMO it's not reasonable at all. It might be boring but it doesn't take much time at all and forcing your users to login with facebook is just lazy and irresponsible.

A social experience might be nice but make sure it's optional, having only facebook as a means to login makes you look fraudulent.

I find this kind of reports very encouraging. I think the future of education is professors becoming free agents in a free market. Really, why can a lawyer set up his own firm or a doctor start his own practice and deal with life and death situations but a professor can’t just teach a few calculus courses without being affiliated with a university?

Well, for one thing, because we as a society may decide we don't want professors or students limiting their field of studies solely motivated by its ROI.

But it's OK for doctors, lawyers and their clients to do that?

I guess there's room for both in all three professions you mention.

but a professor can’t just teach a few calculus courses without being affiliated with a university?

There's nothing stopping a professor from doing just that; there's no legal requirement that all calculus courses be affiliated with a university.

However, there seem to be some very good reasons (some market-based, in fact) why this is not the business model most professors choose.

They can't give course credit or award degrees.

There was a relevant quote posted recently by "tokenadult": “the diligence of public teachers is more or less corrupted by the circumstances which render them more or less independent of their success and reputation in their particular professions.. . . . The privileges of graduation, besides, are in many countries . . . obtained only by attending the lectures of the public teachers. . . . The endowment of schools and colleges have, in this manner, not only corrupted the diligence of public teachers, but have rendered it almost impossible to have any good private ones." -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Part 3, Article II (1776)

Can somebody please clarify the article for me, they were trying to teach people, non-programmers, Objective C in a week? I can't imagine teaching non-programmers 'hello world' to a well understood but basic degree (syntax etc) in a week, let alone in Objective C, let alone in iOS.

It's a very aggressive schedule, and live video (I would argue) doesn't help -- it simply puts pressure on students to focus nonstop, which is very challenging.

The CodeLesson iOS course takes four weeks, and it's all time-shifted, so students can take in the material on a schedule that makes sense to them and ask the instructor questions any time while the course is in session.

Thanks. That sounds like it would be extremely challenging for non-programmers, if that's who it's targeted at.

Suggestion: if the instructor can also bring in another knowledgeable person, they can receive real-time email/chat questions, and try to answer them, or aggregate them in a meaningful way so that the instructor can address them.

I don't know how well this suggestion will work in the general case because it requires two people who are capable of teaching the course, but it may help. Particularly if the person fielding real-time questions starts seeing trends.

Also, if you can't do that, maybe you could set up chats with 6 (or so) students each, who could try to answer each other's questions.

That's an interesting concept. It would be helpful to see that other people are having the same issues in a given class. I wonder how successful an automated system would be based on key words. Something like a twitter stream for a live feed, but more concentrated to focus on recurring questions.

In theory, you could do it with one, if you were prepared to make a leap in the delivery.

Breaking up a 200 person class into 20 person groups would entail repeating the same material 20 times. Instead, it could be done live once, then replayed to those groups. The tutor could then devote all of the text chat time to Q&A on each live session.

I meant have ad-hoc chat sessions among subsets of the class, to simulate students whispering questions to each other in a classroom lecture.

I think that what you suggested would eventually become 20 different lectures - and if you only have 20 people, why not just do a group call?

I have a feeling one of these sites (Niroka, Skillshare, Codecademy etc...) will be a billion dollar revenue school.

Edit: I have a former colleague who started his own SEO shop a while back. After getting tired of competing on price, he switched his business model. He now goes to small companies and charges a minimum of $1000/day to train employees on SEO (I have no evidence, but I believe him). I can only imagine how much money the above companies will make if they were selling course to businesses.

I have a feeling one of these sites (Niroka, Skillshare, Codecademy etc...) will be a billion dollar revenue school

A billion dollars a year? How are they going to manage that? How many people out there want to learn to program computers, and how much are they willing to pay for it?

One million customers per year at a thousand dollars a pop? One hundred thousand customers a year at ten thousand dollars a pop? Ten million customers a year at a hundred bucks a pop?

You're assuming the end game is programming.

You're right, I am.

Comments like yours are a little annoying because you're telling me off for making assumptions without providing alternatives to those assumptions. What else would the end game be? Then we can have a discussion about whether that's reasonable, and whether you can get there from here.

Yes, I apologize. I wasn't telling you off, I wanted to succinctly point out that there's more to the idea. To address your semi-rhetorical question, this model is easily adaptable to anything that you want to casually learn (excluding what I'll call "traditional education spheres"). That is to say, right now it's incredibly difficult both to offer to teach a cooking class in your community and to find a cooking class to take. Thinking about Niroka as a way to connect people with skills willing to teach to people interested in learning new hobbies is better than thinking about it as a place to go to learn (blank). If they grow and expand in this way, Niroka would become the starting point if you're interested in learning a new skill that can't easily be absorbed through what's currently available on YouTube or printed on the web (this also presents people who do offer some of these services that way an easy way to monetize). In a similar vein, it can also be easily adapted to handle scheduling for small businesses dedicated to teaching schools (in exchange for a cut, they maintain the schedule of classes and provide a large potential audience for say, a local pottery place or yarn store, etc.) The harder market to tackle would be traditional education where topics can require highly specialized knowledge and fall prey to bad teachers.

One will end up getting some type of accreditation. When it happens they will go from delivering one-off courses and concentrate on delivering degrees. Someone pays maybe $9,000 to get his BS online. Maybe a mega-corporation pays $1000 per employee to take a 3-day-Hadoop course, etc...

How do you know, rather than doing that, they wouldn't just reduce a multi-billion dollar industry to a 50 million dollar industry, with all 50 million going to them?

I just think that it is a likely outcome. What you say is also possible.

I'm really not sure how well this kind of thing can scale. Without some formal accreditation process for instructors I can't see this bringing in corporate workshops and seminars which are where I'd guess the money is. Having to evaluate every instructor and every curriculum is going to only get harder as these sites grow.

Sadly, I think this kind of thing is going to stay firmly in the realm of the hobbyists.

Hmm, I guess I was the only one who got a Pop-up asking for e-mail with no obvious close button.

This was on regular Firefox with a few plugins.

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