A better way to teach online

Some thoughts from a former schoolteacher.

1. Teachers have exactly no time for evaluating this sort of thing. Your landing page is cluttered with aspirational bullshit about how amazing it is. Get rid of that and tell me exactly what it does. Also it made my laptop fans spin up and it stuttered on scrolling, which is not good.

2. You use the word school, but this word has different meanings. In America, it means any educational institution. In the English-speaking world, school refers specifically to an institution that teaches children, whereas university and college are used for institutions that teach adults. Institutions that teach children have vastly different administrative needs to those that teach adults; it is crucial that you disambiguate which type of institution you are targeting.

3. Your roadmap indicates 'Financial Aid Automation'. Which financial aid systems do you support?

4. Lesson Analytics. Review detailed analytics for lessons, including metrics such as student engagement, completion rates, and performance trends. Is this platform specifically for online learning? You haven't stated this anywhere.

5. Educational institutions already have sophisticated Student Management Systems. Do you integrate with these? If so, which ones? Or do teachers have to manually add students to their courses?

6. I can't see anything here that hasn't been available for more than a decade in several well-regarded competitors. What's your unique selling point?

The demo video for setting an exam does the opposite of what it should be for. I am left feeling more confused and disoriented than I did prior.

So it’s just another LMS? The title made me think this was going to be pedagogical research. Consider me a disappointed online educator.

Honestly? I'm tied of online platforms. They are totally inflexible by nature, they are more and more designed in childish style representing anything easy while missing user control. This IT model, not your creation to be clear but the model, is unsustainable.

What's needed to teach in the present world?

- first teach to use a damn desktop, the MIT Missing Semester should be considered the NORM for ALL "middle-level" (sorry, any countries have it's names and division, meaning for people between around 12 and around 18) WAY before university. No one unable to takes notes, handle his/her own files, able to typeset a decent looking document with small potatoes automation (meaning no Office crap), plotting a simple graph, writing a simple math formula, handling *sv files in simple ways, unable to properly use emails, most common fields and netiquette etc should even be admitted to the university;

- secondly lessons online should be a video like a lectio magistralis, with relevant examples like https://www.youtube.com/user/AlgoRythmics/videos etc where the student listen, take notes, understand, possibly in the evening to fix better memories sleeping at night, than in the morning a small personal recap to prepare {him,her}self teaching a lesson to his own teachers, even some randomly selected ones who know the topic but do not know the video/specific lesson. They listen and ask questions testing the student understatement, while this process teach how to talk, how to take notes, how to get ready to interact with others;

- assignments, projects etc should be done FLOSS style with FLOSS tools chosen by the students themselves among a suggested sets or something they discover alone, because they must explore and learn the world is vary.

All the above do not demand specific web platforms, at maximum a video sharing DESKTOP app PopcornTime (Torrent) style, a classic public discussion system like Usenet with school specific and nationwide groups per class, emails possibly used LOCALLY meaning a desktop MUA on a local maildir and so on because in 2024 people MUST know how to use a desktop not being just able to click around like today workers. Schools must form Citizens not workers. Oh, of course Citizens are also workers, but far more. Similarly a platform must not be a closed tool with fixed rails. What if I just want do set some "notifications" at specific computed dates? Where is the ability to quickly define a date expression like Emacs/org-agenda offer? What about quickly produce math and code and evaluate live in a whiteboard alike tool? User programming MUST be again a thing. That's what we need IMVHO to teach future generations of people able to produce future tech and human evolution.