Show HN: GradeSquare.com - Find and Track your Online Courses | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: GradeSquare.com - Find and Track your Online Courses

gradesquare.com

40 pointsEzGraphs19 comments

There has been an explosion of educational resources in the last few months (think MITx, Stanford, Khan Academy etc).

GradeSquare provides the tools to help you find courses and plan your studies more effectively.

Check us out and let us know what you think!

I think one of the big missing pieces is the social aspect. One of the big benefits of attending classes in person, is that you get to meet and network with other people with similar interests. It's much more difficult to get a study group, or that same level of social interaction when studying at home. There's room there for innovation and for someone to bring all the independent studiers together.

Completely agreed here. I'd also like to add that the benefits of social learning go beyond getting help and collaboration; they also extend to positive and negative reinforcement. Sometimes the benefit of a study group is simply establishing a social dynamic that discourages goofing off. And everybody wants to be able to get attaboys for their work, no matter who it comes from.

What kind of social interaction were you thinking? Some ideas we have been kicking around are the following:

- Integration with Twitter/Facebook/Linked In

- Comments/Tagging/Social Bookmarking on Course pages

- Chat/Video Chat

I'm not sure how much benefit Twitter/Facebook/Linked integration is. For most people, those are already channels they're familiar with and are able to easily reach out to, to find people to learn/study with.

You'll have a big list of people who are taking classes. A feature that suggests people to learn with would be helpful. The big challenge is bringing people together. If I'm studying the same course at the same time as someone I don't know, that doesn't do me much good, but if you can connect us, then you've filled in a big missing piece. I don't know that you need to build tools for that (I can chat, skype, email, etc on my own easy enough, but what I can't do easily is find others taking the same course at the same time).

Ah - it's working now.

Some feedback points (just my feedback - this all could be wrong):

-the "what do you want to learn" input box should be at the top of every page. It drives your core value add more than any of the other stuff.

-The black/white contrast at the top of every page is very distracting and it's difficult to read. The color contrast aside, the header text on your content pages is unnecessarily too big and bold.

The copy needs some work - here are a few suggestions.

-browse by source: "browse by school" would be much more clear way of saying this (I know - some of these places aren't schools, but it drives the point home more clearly for non-technical people who think of source as an obscure reference to a credit in an annotated bibliography).

-clicking "Create a Plan" takes you to the login page, clicking "Start Sharing" takes you to the public plans page. There are disconnects in the language for both of these that might lead to a confusing user experience. You'll want to fix the language/messaging on the homepage buttons or the resulting page to make sure navigation is more consistent.

-I think the "share" section would be better off as "Add" - especially on the web, share has the connotation of somehow being connected to facebook/twitter/social networking. What you mean here by share (correct me if I'm wrong), is "add your own content to our database".

-I'd also rename "plan" to "schedule". Plan also has a connotation of being associated with payments (pricing plans, payment plans, etc). Which is the opposite of what your site is trying to do. Class Schedule is the more consistent term for what you're doing. Your "public plans" page looks like a pricing template at first glance.

Hope that helps - aggregating and organizing free content is an awesome idea that I've been waiting for someone to execute on for a while!

Very helpful - thanks for the ideas. We are planning a round of changes in the near future.

Very cool idea.

Will you be offering a forum or board so people who are taking the same course (or have taken the course) can talk to each other / ask questions?

Also, sign up seems to be down.

Hmm - we have had some signups earlier tonight - Could you try this link directly:

http://gradesquare.com/signup

An internal server error occurred. Please try again later.

Yup - saw that as well....bit of a jump in traffic overwhelmed the server momentarily. Apologies.

> ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid at /home SQLite3::BusyException: database is locked: select * from plans where published='T' order by created_at limit 6 file: statement.rb location: step line: 108

You shouldn't be using SQLite for a prod site, it doesn't handle concurrency well, if at all.

Edit: it also seems like you're using WEBrick as web server, again this is not meant for prod. There's plenty of literature on how to serve rails apps in prod. Look it up.

http://i.imgur.com/cVzAC.png

Don't forget that that stack trace shouldn't be visible! In production you should show a standard 500 error w/o the stack trace. Now people can see your codez. Is the server running in development mode or something?

Had our admins make a number of adjustments to the site - these issues have been resolved and the site is responding much better now.

Works for me.

Is this all Khan Academy courses? What would be the point then? I browsed Algebra and 9 pages are only KA courses.

No others sources are available - see: http://gradesquare.com/by_source

I think you mean

"No, others sources are available."

"No, money down!"

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