Show HN: An e-course creator for hobbyists my wife and I built
coursecraft.net
coursecraft.net
* My very first question: What's your cut? Have a FAQ page listed prominently.
* Have a public, no-login, sample course so I can see what it looks like end-to-end. How are courses branded?
* How can I access my customers, esp. ones I refer from my site? Do I get an email list? Will you be sending them info on your own mailing list?
* Can I sign up with Facebook/Google/Twitter (I don't want yet another account)
Our cut is 5% (like kickstarter), it's on the 'getting paid' faq page which we should make more prominent (it will be a big button on the confirm-your-email page).
Public no-login sample course is on the way!
Accessing your customers, they are listed in the participants page you get on the 'my courses' dashboard. Probably a csv export or something would be good, yes?
Working on signup with twitter.
Thanks again!
Customer export would be good. Might want to have some aweber / mailchimp integration but that's a good v1.
I'll also definitely add a csv export to the participants list, and do you mean some kind of mailchimp integration so you can send announcements and whatnot to your participants? That's an interesting idea we've thrown around a bit already.
As for Udemy's 30%, wow! Udemy is much more of a full-service sort of thing, it seems to me. More formal, they appear to do a lot of promotion and have a ton of community tools and so on. I think ultimately while both are about e-courses, they aren't really in the same market.
For the mailing list, I'd want a mailing list I own to be auto-updated once the user opts-in (vs me having to export then import into MailChimp separately, redoing confirmation emails, etc.).
The biggest single piece that convinces us is that the people we're aiming at are hobbyists. They are already using free tools (often wordpress + plugins, or similar) and only pay PayPal fees. We want them to stop screwing around setting up custom blogs and password protecting them (posts are 'lessons', upload videos to vimeo and password protect those too, etc) and use something end-to-end/hosted instead, for which they pay a small cut of their revenue.
As I mentioned earlier it's the same fee structure as kickstarter, and it seems to work well for them.
* How do you integrate with my Active Directory users?
* I want to import these courses I've designed into my learning management system. Can I do that?
* Do you support SCORM or AICC? Hint: Focus on SCORM. :-)
* Can I test users at the end of the course / during the course?
* Can I let users re-take a test, or block them from retaking a test?
* Every client wants to track and test in different ways.
Finally, when times are hard, the first thing that gets a budget cut in large companies is training (and e-learning expenditure as part of that).
I've seen various "successful" businesses fail in this market niche, usually when the economy is getting hit hard.
If you can make a success of this during the hard times, you'll be golden for the good times!
We're aiming squarely at hobbyists/independent people who want to share/sell their knowledge of things like: knitting, painting, gardening, cooking, small renovation projects, setting up a home theater, and so on. There's no testing at all, in fact!
Ultimately I don't think myself or my wife are in a position to make an appropriate product for the corporate e-learning market. Long story short - neither of us lasted long at the corporate/cube jobs we had after finishing school years ago, and stuff like Active Directory and corporate training programs are pretty far from our minds at this point :)
I know that the pretty "easy as 1-2-3" welcome page is all the rage these days, but my recommendation is to try to get people exposed to and using the site with as little work on their part as possible. Having step 1 be "sign up" means that many people won't ever bother getting to step 2. Ideally, they wouldn't even need to click anything before seeing the product in action. Just a thought...
On the homepage. You're right. We need a 'this is what it looks like' front and center. This is early on still and we just finished the product, so next step is to make a 'how to make a coursecraft course' course which will also serve as an example of what a course looks like/what you can do with the product.
Thanks for the comments!
Very well done though! I'm curious how powerful your creation tool is. You might want to take a look at what apple did with their book creator and get some ideas from them. I think they put a lot of time into making it dynamic enough to handle all kinds of interactive lessons/books.
About the editor, it was definitely one of the harder parts of the app, and to be honest it's not exactly iBooks Author :) We based the capabilities of the tool on some of the courses Sara (my wife) has taken that used (misappropriated?) a blog engine + some plugins to make courses. Really fancy layout controls and stuff is probably a ways off, but something we would definitely love to consider eventually.
Thanks!
Sidenote -- the draft -> publish mechanism is very unintuitive.
Can you clarify what about it is unintuitive to you? Should there maybe be a way to publish right on the lesson edit page? There is a help doc on 'different ways to run a course' that suggest how you might use that option (https://www.coursecraft.net/help/running-a-course).
Thanks!
Consider it considered :)
also a short video describing your vision/product would be extremely beneficial.
Right now we're working on a 'how to make a coursecraft course' course, and a video is definitely on our xmas list, although it's a much bigger undertaking.
Thanks!