CourseTalk: Reviews for Udacity, Coursera, and edX | Hacker News Reader

CourseTalk: Reviews for Udacity, Coursera, and edX

coursetalk.org

70 pointsjspaulding25 comments

Things I like: - the sign up form was really easy, which is good - I like the star rating / comment combination, as it allows people to give details - the ability to rank the difficulty of a course is nice (I'm assuming you have plans to somehow display this data once you have enough of it seeded) - the ability to filter courses by tag is good (though who is deciding the tags?)

Things that could be improved: - the Sign In With Twitter didn't work for me, I got an error - I'd like to see a more detailed rating system (like rating the course on several criteria - 3 stars for material, 5 stars for instructor responsiveness, etc) - I think the ability to up-vote or down-vote reviews would be nice - The comment section should be more helpful in writing a review (suggest things the reviewer should talk about)

The value in this type of system is around the quality of the feedback. To that end, you need to make it a priority to get quality reviews from users. Having suggestions of what the user should write about, weighting reviews by up-votes, etc. are just ways to increase the quality of the reviews you receive. Things like "Nice course." aren't going to be helpful to anyone.

You are totally right about the quality of feedback and these all seem like really good suggestions thank you. I don't know what's going on with the Twitter sign-in.. It was working yesterday. bah!

Twitter deprecated an oauth endpoint yesterday, so I'd check the URLs that you're attempting to hit. We ran into this yesterday, as well.

Please let me know if you have suggestions for the site, thanks.

Much needed, thanks for making it.

Is there a way to link to external reviews? I've reviewed both Introduction to Databases (http://henrikwarne.com/2011/12/18/introduction-to-databases-...) and Design and Analysis of Algorithms Part I (http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms-course...)

That's a great question and the answer is not now. However it seems like there certainly should be. Maybe users could enter a URL for their review as a substitute for the review text. I will follow up with you if/when this is available.

OK. I've copied them in for now.

It would also be good with a "Was this review helpful"-button a la Amazon, so the reviews can be ordered according to helpfulness.

Agreed. Was thinking to take a few features from Amazon :)

Agreed, this would be a nice feature to add.

This is pretty cool, let me know if you want to partner up - I built http://coursebacon.com/ as a side project and it seems that we're both trying to solve the same pain. Email is in my profile.

I would like to thank you for building this. With the large number of courses currently being offered, evaluation of the courses is valuable not just to prospective students, but for the course organizers and instructors themselves.

It's a rare "show HN" that shows me something I really needed, and which has clearly been done well. Kudos.

This will probably be hard to do in the short term but if MOOCs take off it would be good to actually verify if the reviewer actually has taken the course. I think that's one key issue with Yelp - there is no verification of reviewers so there are a lot of spam issues : http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/obama-gets-a-l...

Maybe you can talk to the Udacity/edX/Coursera guys to get some kind of API access? Regardless, this is awesome - I've taken two courses on Udacity, and love it so far. However, there has been an explosion of courses offered so it would be nice to have tools like this to help me filter.

I agree that fake reviews could easily be a nasty issue on Yelp and other sites. In this case I'm not particularly worried about it.. but only time will tell. API access could be good for a variety of reasons though :)

The big banner headline on the page just says reviews for Coursera, Udacity, and EdX. That might mislead people into thinking that is all that is there. Perhaps there should be something that that indicates that others are also included?

Yes probably

A suggestion for the future: Implement an optional filter for the ratings so that it will show with five stars the range from 4* to 5*. 4.0-4.2 - one star (1.0-4.0 is also one star) 4.2-4.4 - two stars ... 4.8-5.0 - five stars This is because most people can't comprehend how to rate generally good things but which are not perfect on the absolute scale. Relative scale is an even harder concept.

This method won't help of course so in the future you'll need to distinguish so people as "experts" (this is a human task, it can't be awarded statistically - by a number of reviews or anything similar). After that implement separate rating for them.

Even that won't fix biased reviews but will mitigate them considerably. The task of implementing good rankings is a very hard one.

What if I were to just go ahead and list the rating as 4.2 or 4.8 and not show star symbols at all?

Looks nice, I was looking into this courses so this might help.

Just one suggestion, I know you might want to expand using social media, but those buttons up there really annoy me. Can you put them at the bottom of the page or somewhere else?

Yeah, I had a tough time making those look pretty. Removed for now.

Why do I redirect to coursetalk.org when I go to lunchtree.com?

haha.. yes, well LunchTree was a previous project that is not currently active.. I'm not sure why it is forwarding.. I must have done that at some point.

You must have configured iptables or reverse proxy wrongly.

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