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Comment by bruceb | Hacker News Reader

Wow just found out we were posted about on HN. (we were hoping to be a little more ready for this then we are now)

So what are we doing? Well there are many sites that aggregate courses out there. That is easy. What we are aiming to do is create a simple standard. You can see what a course would roughly be if you took them at a US university.

The US doesn't have a set standard but most universities classify their courses with similar numbering. For example business students would take Introduction to Financial Accounting then Introduction to Managerial Accounting. Both would usually be 200 level (2nd year) courses.

This standard also allows user to make apples to apples comparisons between courses.

There are few errors on CourseBuffet, we are working on them. Thoughts, criticism, comments, please share! thanks!

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I think this is exactly what open courseware needs. I will be cheering you on and following your progress closely!

I am not sure if you already have this planned but I would love to see an open curriculum or sorts. Basically a curated list of courses (that have proper video lectures) that I can take to get a degree equivalency.

If for example I wanted to learn everything an undergraduate in business learns at a university, I can take the courses in your list in the order you suggest and get an equivalent education. (These courses should be recordings of actual classes and not dumbed down short videos).

I think this curation of courses will go a long way in how open courseware is perceived.

This times 100.

I've been trying to 'create' a syllabus for teaching myself math but it is a pain to be able to get this info and then find the courses for it. I go to MIT and 1/2 of the classes are available on video, then I try to search for the ones that aren't in other Unis but they have different names which makes it all the more confusing.

I actually ended up just going to my old uni syllabus and just buy the required reading books and try from there, but having this compiled would be such a great help

CourseBuffet actually grew out of my frustration with open courseware. So much content but poorly organized. Too much random.

As for degree equivalency ...stay tuned.

check out Saylor.org. they're trying to build a single open education platform that actually has self study equivalents for entire degree programs

I like what they do. I see them as a good place for taking on this type of standards definition project, which is an activity better suited for a foundation like Saylor than a startup.

Sounds nice so far. What I've immediately noticed is that the search dialogue isn't very keyboard-friendly. Just searching 'sec' gave me a few suggestions, but selecting them with the cursor keys and hitting Enter didn't do anything - only seems to work with a mouse. :/

Created an account to test it out. Looks good. But I wasn't able to find Reactive Programming[0] class but I assume new classes are still being loaded and added.

A suggested feature, and one I've considered doing myself, is to have a sort of timeline of classes. So that if I sign up for a class from November to January, and one from December to February, it would show that they overlap during December and January. One of the biggest problems I have is biting off more then I can chew, and what I like to do is visualize each class as a per week load and stack them on top of each other. That way I can find bottle necks where several classes might overlap in the final and beginning weeks leaving me with an expected work load of 30+ hours.

All and all it looks great.

[0] https://www.coursera.org/course/reactive

Nice work.

Some (slightly superficial) feedback: In the LHS navigation/filter, when opening one of the option menus (eg 'By Universities') they can have too many options to fit on the screen. The LHS pane doesn't scroll so you can't get to the lower options. Also the '>' arrow should really be clickablabe and point down when opened.

It's getting late but I will be digging in tomorrow. I have a month off coming up and fully plan on indulging, and the timing of the release on this couldn't be better. Do you have an official email to send bugs and the like towards with in-depth descriptions of how to replicate and such?

Thanks a ton for doing this! It's wonderful :)

coursebuffet@gmail.com

Thanks. The classifying is what took (still taking) a lot of time. Looking to give everyone the most accurate idea of how a course would be classified at a university.

That sounds like a great way to go about it. Personally I'm in a boat where the standard university style of education was rewarding when I had the right professors but largely was not tangential to the growth of my knowledge in most ways. Such is why I ended up attending a programming bootcamp after years of doing it on my own. So services like this really, really appeal to me. I'm just an information/knowledge acquisition junkie and do so at a pace faster than most courses provide.

So, thanks again and I'll be sure to give some input once I have the time to browse around :)

Both would usually be 200 level (2nd year) courses.

FYI, this may not be a universally-accepted numbering system. At Berkeley, lower-division courses have two digits (1A, 55, 64), upper-division courses are in the 100s, and graduate classes are in the 200s.

Yes this is the difficulty as there is no set standard. We went with the basic 3 digit system as most people in the US are familiar with it. Most will understand (some subject) 101 is an entry level course. There are those in other countries who don't get it as we have found out. We are working on a new design that will be clearer in explaining this.

The 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 system is quite clear to me.

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