Show HN: CourseNest – Online Weekly Discussion for MOOCs

Kudos for highlighting one of the problems with MOOCs, which by definition sever the priceless face-to-face connection between a student and a teacher, and then exacerbate the problem by scaling into an N-thousand-to-one student-teacher ratio. But CourseNest (good luck keeping that name, you only have to worry about the Google legal team beast waking up (they own Nest)) is unlikely to make a difference, in my view. Too many middlemen, too many businesses chasing after the conversation that should be held in a physical classroom or lab or, worst case, in office hours.

This is not an economically sustainable education platform. This is a chat room. It's a feature, not a business.

$25 per single class discussion, and I see on the pricing page it's actually not really per discussion, but is priced per entire class of N-discussions, with around 1 discussion section per week. How long are these discussion sections? Is it an hour say?

The "first two are free" claim seems to be deceptive advertising as it actually seems to be that the price is $25 * (N-2). That's a pricing formula and not really free discussions since one pays the full price to "get" them. In general, I forever avoid companies that make deceptive and misleading claims since the fact that they make them means they have unethical management, which is not something that is ever correctable.

This looks really cool. I've run into this exact problem with MOOCs in the past. That pricing seems kind of expensive, and it looks like they only offer 2 courses right now, but I'd love to see it grow as a platform.

It's interesting, there is a poll on the Coursera page asking about interest in 1-on-1 tutoring sessions. This sort of sounds like that, sounds like Coursera might be looking into this already?